Font packages

[Kevin E Martin]

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 10:51:47AM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 02:13 -0400, Kevin E Martin wrote:
> > I've been working through the fonts today, and there are several methods
> > that could be used to package them:
> > 
> > 1. Create packages similar to the ones in the monolithic tree (100dpi,
> >    75dpi, misc, cyrillic, ...)
> > 2. Create packages per family (charter, courier, helvetica, ...)
> > 3. Create packages per foundry (Adobe, B&H, Bitstream, ...)
> > 4. Create packages using some combination of these options
> > 
> > I'm leaning toward using a combination (e.g., font-adobe-courier-75dpi,
> > font-bitstream-charter-100dpi, etc.) it would give our users the
> > clearest indication of exactly what's contained within the package and
> > it allows more fonts to be added to the font module without conflating
> > the official XOF packages.  This breakdown also has a nice side effect
> > of not having to deal with multiple font licenses in the same package.
> > I'll go ahead with this scheme unless someone comes up with a better way
> > to group fonts.
> 
> I'd suggest throwing the bitmap fonts into as big chunks as possible ...
> it's just not worth the time to manage lots of subpackages for this
> legacy stuff. 75dpi, 100dpi, misc is the traditional division and
> should be fine.

The fonts I listed above are legacy, but the breakdown is not just for
the old bitmap fonts -- it's also for TTF, Type1, etc. fonts.  The idea
is to make a uniform package name space that is easily understandable,
works for all fonts, separates the fonts along license boundaries and
allows new fonts to be added to the module that are not necessarily
included in the official XOF releases.  Unfortunately, the old font dir
names 75dpi, 100dpi, misc, TTF, Type1, etc. don't give us this level of
flexibility.

Kevin