Speedo fonts - Are they still supported?

[Mike A. Harris]

Roland Mainz wrote:
>>After chatting with others a bit, nobody seemed to know why
>>speedo no longer works, so I dug into it deeper and discovered
>>the following:
>>
>>https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548
> 
> 
> That issue was debated long long ago what we should do with the old
> rasterizers (Speedo, PS Type1 etc.). For Speedo the issue was that AFAIK
> no new fonts were made within the last 10 (or more) years, TrueType has
> AFAIK superset all of it's functionality, a couple of Unicies (AFAIK
> Solaris and AIX) dropped support for Speedo fonts and all the Speedo
[minisnip]
 > So
 > far it made sense to get rid of it to save some bytes in the Xserver
 > code...

Ah yes, this does sound sensible.

 > fonts distributed at X.org are available as PS Type1 fonts, too.

Available as Type1 fonts that accompany Xorg, or 3rd party?  I never
noticed before either way, so just trying to confirm.

I think we will probably remove the .spd font files from our
distribution either way, as that seems to make the most sense
with the above info.


>>Since we are seeing several people reporting bugs now, that fonts
>>that previously worked fine, no longer work, this was kindof
>>surprising because X.Org still supplies these fonts *and* installs
>>them by default.
>>
>>I have no strong feelings either way as to wether this gets fixed
>>by re-enabling speedo font support, or by preventing the speedo fonts
>>from getting installed and/or removing them from CVS, as there have
>>only been a few people file bug reports.
> 
> Fixing the "make install" to not installing the Speedo fonts when the
> Speedo font rasterizer is not build is fine (erm... we may run into
> trouble with Xvnc unless that Xserver has Egbert's code to drop font
> path elements with invalid/unsupported content) - but those fonts should
> not be removed until the same is done with the xc/lib/font/speedo/
> rasterizer.

Agreed, this sounds like the best solution for the Xorg tree.

> I'd like to avoid killing the code for now until it is clear
> whether the FreeType2 library gets Speedo support or not - once they
> made a final decision the fate of the Speedo rasterizer+fonts should be
> debated here.

That's reasonable I guess.


> Another issue is whether the Speedo fonts shipped in the X.org tree
> should be replaced with PS Type1 versions of the same fonts - does
> anyone know whether this will trigger any licensing issues ?

I've attached the COPYRIGHT file from the Speedo dir in XFree86 4.3.0,
which I happened to have laying around.  IANAL, but my interpretation
of the license seems that it would permit modification and
redistribution.  Changing font types would fit under "modification"
I believe.

Anyone up to the task of converting to Type1 or TTF?  Type1 is
probably superior for this particular case.
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