widelands-dev team mailing list archive

[Peter Schwanemann <Nasenbaer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I am writing this mail, as SirVer is currently changing some fonts in 
Widelands and I want to avoid that he spents time on something that 
*maybe* has to be reverted. But well, why do I think that there is a 
problem at all? Here is the story:
Some years ago Widelands delivered fonts, which licenses were 
incompatible to the GPL. Because of that we had a discussion on our 
mailing list and finally I took the task to search for a replacement for 
those fonts. In general there were three points I had to think about:
* the license of the font
* how many supported glyphs it has (does it provide glyphs for arabic, 
japanese, etc.? - if we have translations, they should be useable in 
game - there is still a problem with languages with right to left text, 
but that's another topic)
* and of course the style of the font

So coming back to todays situation: SirVer merged an awesome new text 
render system two days ago :). Following this merge, he is now improving 
the texts in game and did replace the FreeSerif font with the DejaVu 
fonts. As far as I understand his commit messages, his point is about 
"style" - the look of the font. But I fear it's not that easy.
Let's compare the fonts for the three points mentioned above:

1. The FreeSerif and FreeSans fonts from the freefont project at 
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/ ae the ones we used in the 
last years. However the ones we deliver are an already quite old release 
and it seems SirVer did not like their look ;). Positive side is: the 
ones we deliver are still licensed GPL v2.
2. The current release version of the FreeSerif and FreeSans fonts are 
even more complete than the ones we currently deliver. As far as I found 
out in the internet, it is still by far the most complete GPL compatible 
font. This means, no other font can provide us with support for that 
many different glyphs (and thus languages). Further it's look was 
improved. Negative side: it is now licensed GPLv3 or higher - to use 
them in a Widelands software bundle (e.g. installer for Windows), we 
would have to license the whole bundle and so Widelands GPLv3 as well or 
show different licenses for different parts of the bundle.
3. The DejaVu fonts that SirVer included in Widelands because of their 
style are released under a free license (Bitstream Vera Font Copyright 
and Arev Font Copyright - *http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/License*). 
However all discussions on the internet I found in a 5 minutes search 
only pointed out, that those fonts are used in open source projects 
(under GPL) and thus seem to be GPL compatible ;) ... Following those 
dicussions I guess we are save to use it, but to be strict, it's license 
is not GPL, so if we include the DejaVu fonts in a software bundle, we 
would have to show the GPL as well as the DejaVu license. BIG NEGATIVE 
point of DejaVu fonts is the number of glyphs they provide. They only 
provide Latin, Greek, Cyrilic, Armenian and Georgian Glyphs (see 
http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Main_Page), some more glyph sets are 
incomplete, like arabic, some are not at all provided like japanese, 
chinese, etc.

I see different possibilitys to handle this:

1. Go by one font that provides glyphs for almost all languages, so a 
"select used font option" is not needed. the freefont project fonts are 
not 100% complete (concering the unicode standard), but by far more 
complete than the DejaVu fonts, so if we take this way, they would be 
our choice.
2. Widelands already supports an option to select a font for the main 
menu - if that option is improved to be usable for the whole game, it 
could be used for selecting a "font set", that defines different fonts 
and styles (heading, buttons, texts, etc.). That way we could use 
different fonts and users could change the font for the whole game, if 
their glyph set is not supported. This could maybe be improved that far, 
that cmake includes an automated script that searches for fonts it knows 
and generates new font sets. (To explain the idea behind that option: If 
you install libreoffice on Mageia linux and select to install the 
japanese translation for libreoffice, the needed fonts are installed as 
well. If japanese is not installed, the fonts are not needed as well...)

Okay, this mail got really long.

My question: what do you think is the way to go?

Personally I prefare to go with option 1 (only one font set) for now and 
update the freefonts to their new version. This opinion is simply based 
on the idea, that option 2 might be quite a lot of work and would only 
be usable, if right to left text is usable in Widelands as well.

Cheers
Peter