[Fwd: Droid fallback CJK and fontconfig?]

[Qianqian Fang]

hi Nicolas

As we discussed last time, I've sent email asking for official confirmation
and clarifications of the license in the font metadata. I am now waiting
to hear back from them (message attached).

The Han glyphs in Droid fallback pretty much follow the Han-unification
as in the unicode documentations. That means they look very much close
to what Chinese mainland users preferred. The style is Heiti, which is like
ttf-wqy-zenhei and is essentially a sans-serif style. There are 16,502 Hanzi
in the CJK basic block, which is the union of GB2312 and Big5 charsets.
Because this font is targeted at memory-limited devices, there are
15,524 Han glyphs were composed by references, the rest are stand-alone
outline glyphs which can not be decomposed into components.
It contains no embedded bitmaps, but the outline quality is very good.
I believe most zh_* users will be very happy if this font will be used
as desktop font (the current zh_* font on Fedora is wqy-bitmapfont
which is also using the Han-unification forms). It may be a little bit
difficult for Japanese and Korean users though.

As this font does not provide the full coverage to all CJK glyphs,
in the mean time, I believe the current national standards and
regulations in mainland China prefer GBK (same as CJK unified ideographs),
or even GB18030 (CJK basic+CJK Ext. A) coverage, so, I've planned to extend
this font to at least GBK charset. That means to complete about 4500
glyphs. I and a friend are now working on an online tool to allow
people to compose new glyphs from existing Droid components.
It is almost working, you can browse the following link for a sample
output: (need to view with firefox 3.x)

http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?ViewGlyph#SFD/Droid/%E8%85%AA

the GUI is at http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?BezierGlyph
but it only has Chinese instructions so far.

Once the license is sorted out, we will start promoting this project
among the Chinese users, and make our way toward a more complete
CJK font with this extension. I also planned to look into the reference
glyphs and seek the possibility of further compression of the font.
Similar to the current ttf-wqy-zenhei settings, Chinese users will also be
happy to see a mono-spaced face co-existing with the regular face in
ttc form.

Qianqian


Joe Onorato wrote:
> Hi Qianqian,
>
> I'll follow up with the people responsible for fonts.
>
> -joe
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Qianqian Fang <fangqq at gmail.com 
> <mailto:fangqq at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     hi Joe
>
>     A few weeks ago, I posted a question on android-discussion group,
>     asking about the droid font licenses:
>
>     http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread/thread/3c60867cab66e23d/ab69c3174b63ca4c?lnk=gst&q=font#ab69c3174b63ca4c
>     <http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread/thread/3c60867cab66e23d/ab69c3174b63ca4c?lnk=gst&q=font#ab69c3174b63ca4c>
>
>     I really appreciate your feedback and confirmation on the license
>     matter.
>
>     As I am an maintainer for an open-source font project, I also
>     maintain a few CJKV font packages for Fedora. Recently, I
>     mentioned my plan of making derived fonts from Droid
>     font family at fedora's font list, the people in charge appeared
>     to be very careful, and warned me to obtain a more "official"
>     clarification on the license before taking further actions. You
>     can see our discussions at
>
>     https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-fonts-list/2008-November/msg00009.html
>
>     We both felt that the best way to make the clarifications is to state
>     it in the metadata section of the font, there are dedicated
>     "License Description"
>     and "License Info URL" fields in the name table to specify the
>     font licenses:
>
>     http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_name.html
>
>     I am wondering if it is possible for android team to update the font
>     files and clarify the licenses. In this way, people's confusion on
>     the fonts
>     and the sdk package will completely go away.
>
>     If you or your team member do have the plan to make this
>     change, I would be appreciated if you can let me know when
>     the updated fonts are pushed into svn, so I can mobilize my
>     team to start planned works around these fonts.
>
>     thank you so much for your time and looking forward to your reply.
>
>     Qianqian
>
>



Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As you probably know Google has released a Droid font set as part of its
> Android platform. While the font licensing is being clarified
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472635
> (Fedora packaging blocker) I've taken a quick look at the font files.
>
> The set includes a huge "Droid Sans Fallback" font with CJK coverage.
> Could the CJK folks take a look at it and tell me how this font should
> be treated: as Japanese-only, Chinese-only, Korean-only before/after
> current CJK defaults, etc? Han unification means someone will probably
> not be happy about it.
>
> I've uploaded preliminary droid packages there
> http://nim.fedorapeople.org/fontpackages/
>
> so people can check them out.
>
> Regards,
>
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> --
> Fedora-i18n-list mailing list
> Fedora-i18n-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-i18n-list