This is a forward of the Ubuntu bug https://launchpad.net/bugs/1153188

According to that bug report, users speaking Urdu do not consider the
current font Nafees Web Naskh sufficient for rendering Urdu text. On
their behalf I suggest that also Nafees Nastaleeq is shipped with
fonts-nafees.

http://www.crulp.org/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesNastaleeq.html

Quoting Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj@ubuntu.com):

Hello (again) Gunnar,

We could indeed package *all* fonts from this resource:

http://www.crulp.org/software/localization.htm

Looking further, I find it sad that no real source is provided for
these fonts, by the way.

Anyway, adding this to my TODO list, but the package will first go to
Debian experimental, not unstable.

And, ifyou're in touch with people interested in Urdu localization,
this language is one of the major ones that we're missing in Debian
Installer....hint, hint.

Hi Christian!

Right now I'm not sure that would be desirable.

I prepared a temporary (for Ubuntu 13.04) package with both fonts, and
at the Ubuntu bug we are trying to figure out how to distinguish between
those two. :(

Possibly this is an easy one for somebody who - unlike me - knows these
things. A helping hand from you at https://launchpad.net/bugs/1153188
would be much appreciated.

Will mention it once this font issue has been resolved.

All Nafees fonts have the same preferred family name, Nafees, which is
wrong since they are different families.

As regard to Nafees Nastaleeq, I had a fork of it[1] mainly adding
Arabic support since it is an Urdu only font, but also fixing some bugs
in the original font. I mad no releases so far because I'm not very
happy with the quality of vowel mark positioning but had no time to work
on it yet (but it is not any worse than the original).

Regards,
Khaled

[1] https://github.com/khaledhosny/hussaini-nastaleeq

Quoting Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj@ubuntu.com):
After a closer look, I changed my mind : imho, we should switch from
one "fonts-nafees" package providing only one font, to a family of
fonts-nafees-* packages, eventually, with a virtual package providing
all fonts.

The reason for this is that each font in the "family" (indeed, "from
that foundry") has its own version numbering scheme, so we want to be
able to update one without updating the whole package.

Regarding Khaled's mention of enhancing some of the fonts, I'm fine
with that but, imho, it should be proposed upstream so that they can
include an update with Arabic glyphs in future releases.

Ok, I see the logic in that.

Christian, do you know how /etc/fonts/conf.avail/65-nonlatin.conf should
be changed? Something like:

  <family>Nafees Nastaleeq</family> <!-- arabic (ur) -->
  <family>Nafees Web Naskh</family> <!-- arabic (ur) -->

??
Will that load the right font even if e.g. gnome-font-viewer thinks they
are both named "Nafees"?
Does the naming of the *.ttf files matter?
Would it be proper to have two arabic (ur) entries in
/etc/fonts/conf.avail/65-nonlatin.conf like that?

Sorry for being a pain. ;-)

Quoting Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj@ubuntu.com):


Honestly, I don't know. There are many things about fonts that are not
completely clear to me..:-)

Maybe other pkg-fonts team members will know, though.

What about we collecting the distilled knowledge of years and proposing a
presentation on "Fonts for Debian Maintainers" in one of these DebConfs?

I am willing to collect some notes that I have here about fonts and
transform those in a paper for the proceedings/presentation/whatever, but I
would need some help, perhaps.


Regards,

Soon before the April Ubuntu release we figured out a way that seems to
have made the Urdu users happy. We patched fonts-nafees 1.2-5 by adding
NafeesNastaleeq.ttf together with a recipe which I attach to this
message. We did not address the version number issue (not enough time).

The complete diff is available at
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/172050192/fonts-nafees_1.2-5_1.2-5ubuntu1.diff.gz

It would of course be desirable if we could get Ubuntu and Debian back
in sync. Creating a separate fonts-nafees-nastaleeq package would be
fine for us, but that recipe (or something else with the same effect)
seems to be necessary as well.

Quoting Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj@ubuntu.com):


Where can the TTF file be downloaded? We should also check if there is
a "source" file of any kind as we now prefer including source files
for fonts when we can.

Hi Christian,

2014-06-08 08:40, Christian PERRIER skrev:

http://www.cle.org.pk/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesNastaleeq.html

(the Nafees_Nastaleeq_v1.02.zip file)

That zip file is the only source file I'm aware of. Before adding it to
the package I renamed "Nafees Nastaleeq v1.02.ttf" to "NafeesNastaleeq.ttf".

Quoting Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj@ubuntu.com):


I think it would probably be better to introduce a new source package,
as this font is apparently released from a fully independent process
and has a clearly distinct version numbering scheme

From our package naming policy, the source package name should be
something like fonts-crulp-nafeesnastaleeq (we should probably then
rename the existign fonts-nafees package to fonts-crulp-nafeeswebnaskh.

And, eventually, that we shouldpackage other fonts listed on
http://www.cle.org.pk/software/localization.htm, assuming their
licence allows that.

Other font packages contributors, advices?

I did some research on this...

Upstream are using Microsoft VOLT (Visual OpenType Layout Tool), which
saves and loads TTF files. The source for the TTF is the other larger
TTF from Nafees_Nastaleeq_v1.02(VOLT_project).zip that contains more
font tables. The main difference is the TSIV table, which contains
textual source code produced by font designers running VOLT. FontForge
doesn't appear to understand/use TSIV, but with ttx from fonttools it
is possible to dump the font to XML, modify the TSIV and then convert
back to TTF. There is no graphical interface though. FontForge appears
to be able to discard the TSIV table also. I'm not sure what all this
means in terms of the DFSG but it is probably OK.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/VOLT.mspx
http://scripts.sil.org/volt_tutorial
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=706888#c15

The more problematic thing is that the PDF document was produced in
Microsoft Word and the .doc file (the source for the PDF) is not
available for download.

May I suggest helping upstream to come up with reproducible buildpath
instead of creating a Debian-specific one ? A much better long-term
strategy for everyone.

You can look into libfont-ttf-scripts-perl (and newer repository
version) which contain the volt2ttf and related utilities and can work
with text-based representations of the smart features. (vtp files).

Type designers are increasingly moving towards using the .fea features
files format.

BTW, if you haven't noticed yet, there are significant issues with the
licensing of this font that still need fixing (it's sadly a non-standard
mishmash of licenses with little coherence, legal validity or practical
use cases:
http://www.cle.org.pk/software/license/Nafees_Nastaleeq_License.html So
I would expect our ftpmasters to seriously frown on this and reject
it!). TTBOMK various people (including Mozilla) are in touch with
upstream to get them to re-release under a community-approved license.

HTH,

2014-06-09 07:16, Christian PERRIER wrote:

It looks like CRULP is CLE nowadays => fonts-cle-nafeesnastaleeq

2014-06-09 16:43, Nicolas Spalinger wrote:

Well, please let me remind of the fact that another font with the very
same license is packaged in fonts-nafees and has been in the Debian
archive for 8 years. Consequently it would be pretty inconsistent to
reject a request to add Nafees Nastaleeq, wouldn't it?

There are other Nastaleeq fonts. For instance, from the discussion at
the related Ubuntu bug I understand that some Urdu users would prefer
Jameel Noori Nastaleeq over Nafees Nastaleeq.

http://www.ffonts.net/Jameel-Noori-Nastaleeq.font

The ttf files included in the zip that can be downloaded from there have
this embedded copyright notice:

"This Font Is Free Of Charge For Urdu Lovers"

Suppose that wouldn't make the ftpmasters feel more comfortable. ;)

I get the impression that the FOSS concept isn't well established in
Pakistan. Let's not be too picky about licenses while trying to change that.

That would be great but since upstream are using Microsoft Windows I'm
not sure they would appreciate us telling them to completely switch
around their workflows and or platform without clear arguments about
the benefits from their PoV. Personally I don't know enough about the
upstream side of font production to be able to provide those
arguments.

Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware these existed. It would be great
to add some info about the various upstream font technologies,
non-standard sfnt tables and how to work with them in Debian to the
wiki page or a sub-page of the wiki page.

https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts

I did notice the custom license but didn't analyse it for DFSG issues.

Quoting Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj@ubuntu.com):

Well, if the Nafees Web font doesn't have a proper license, then it is
a bug and, yes, there are bugs that aren't discovered for a very long
time...:-)

That's why SIL introduced the SIL license, which should really be
adopted by all those fonts designed in various language promotion
organizations such as CLE....

Sadly, quite often, discussions with these upstream don't show any big
interest from them to make things clearer wrt the fotns (and other
stuff they provide).
their own font (or keyboard mapping or whatever) and it's very hard
for those who coordinate i18n in distros to have a good figure.

Obviously none of us is in good position to decide what is a good font
to represent Urdu (except that Urdu is certainly one of the most
complex Arabic script languages when it comes at combinations,
ligatures, etc.) --> it mixes the sense of details for calligraphy
from both the Arabic script culture and the one from the Indic scripts
cultures....and, believe me, both are very picky when it comes at
calligraphy...:-)
That's a very common problem with fonts, sadly : imprecise licenses,
mysterious build paths and very vague release processes....

Let's first decide about Nafees Nastaleeq....

2014-06-10 07:07, Christian PERRIER wrote:

This is the license again:
http://www.cle.org.pk/software/license/Nafees_Nastaleeq_License.html

Basically it's an Expat license with a few restrictions:

- You must rename the font if you modify it
- While you are permitted to include the font in commercial software,
  you are not allowed to sell the font itself.
- You may not use the names Nafees or CRULP in an advertising context
  without permission.

So, would any of those restrictions prevent the font from being included
in the Debian archive? Personally I think not.

One of the major issues lies with a clause referring explicitly to the GPL
while the license itself not being the GPL. Basically the font embedding
clause is really messy: this font exception (lifted from the
experimental font
exception designed to work with the GNU GPL) can be removed in
downstream derivatives: users and publishers cannot be sure that
derivative fonts explicitly allow embedding or not. The significant risk
is that documents created using derivative fonts will have to be
released under GPL because this font license propagates to the document
itself which is an unintended but quite problematic side-effect. The
consequence is that it breaks the trust users can put into the licensing if
they can't be sure if they can embed the fonts or not in their documents.


And - as Christian rightly pointed out - there are serious issues from a
compatibility point of view to take into account. For example, the smart
font code is stuck in a silo project-only license. Not so good for
future maintainership and general efforts to move towards a more open
buildpath.

Debian and Ubuntu should not encourage but rather resist every
well-meaning research institute around the world trying to cook up their own
project-specific and incompatible license.

I think it's well-worth for the benefit of Debian and Ubuntu users of
this font (and the wider community) to continue to advocate for a
re-relase by upstream under a community-recognized and DFSG-approved
license instead.


Thanks to all involved for their work on this :-)

Instead of what? Do you suggest that Nafees Web Naskh is dropped from
the Debian archive and that both Nafees Web Naskh and Nafees Nastaleeq
are dropped from the Ubuntu archive and that we leave Urdu speaking
users of Debian or Ubuntu on their own with respect to fonts?

Even if the license isn't *ideal* from a DFSG POV, it does not make the
fonts non-free AFAICT. Hence a reasonable approach IMO would be to do
both, i.e. keep accepting the current license for now while proposing
upstream to re-release the fonts under a license without the mentioned
ambiguities.