Re: [Fontforge-devel] [PATCH] Copyright field in Font Info

[Khaled H. <kha...@eg...>]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 10:34:29PM -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:04:42 -0000 (GMT)
> "Paul Flo Williams" <pa...@fr...> wrote:
> 
> > This is a follow-up to Kevin Fenzi's bug report about treatment of
> > copyright symbols in the Copyright field. The bug report actually
> > splits to two issues:
> 
> ...snip...
> 
> I agree with this. ;) I would love to see it fixed. 
> 
> > BTW, Kevin, any chance of getting the 20090923 release into F12?
> 
> Well, we talked about it on the fedora fonts list, but we use fontforge
> to build all our fonts that are built from source, and so we don't like
> upgrading it in a stable release unless we can really avoid it, as we
> won't easily see if it breaks building something that worked with the
> previous version. ;( 

I think auto-building fonts from SFD files is a useless at beast,
disastrous at worst. No mutter how we love FontForge, I really love it
myself, but itsn't stable software and it can break fonts badly without
no one noticing. The upstream supplied TTF or OTF files are guaranteed
to work as expected and are supposedly tested by some one who knows the
expected result, the auto-built fonts isn't. Also, fonts aren't
executable, and the notation of source code and binaries don't really
apply; SFNT containers are contain all the information needed (albeit
in a binary format) and are essentially the source files, while SFD is
an ASCII representation of FontForge's internal font structure, it isn't
really a "source code".

Also, fonts built with some recent FontForge release might give totally
different result, even totally broken, when built with older FontForge
release, depending on what new features or fixed bugs the font depends
on.

I fail to see the point behind this, given the extra complication and
potential breakage.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer