Greetings,

My team at SIL-WSTech is about to released a font not in Debian,
Scheherazade New, that I would like to package for Debian.

Package name    : fonts-sil scheherazadenew
Version         : 3.000
Upstream Author : SIL WSTech <fonts@sil.org>
URL             : https://software.sil.org/scheherazade/
License         : OFL-1.1
Section         : fonts
Description     : Arabic script font designed in the traditional Naskh style

Scheherazade New, named after the heroine of the classic Arabian Nights
tale, is designed in a similar style to traditional typefaces such as
Monotype Naskh, extended to cover the full Unicode Arabic repertoire.

The goal for this product is to provide a single Unicode-based font
family that contains a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for
almost any Arabic-based writing system. This font makes use of
state-of-the-art font technologies to support complex typographic issues.

This font provides a simplified rendering of Arabic script, using basic
connecting glyphs but not including a wide variety of additional
ligatures or contextual alternates (only the required lam-alef
ligatures). This simplified style is often preferred for clarity,
especially in non-Arabic languages, but may be considered unattractive
in more traditional and  literate communities.

Two fonts from this typeface family are included in this release:

     * Scheherazade New Regular
     * Scheherazade New Bold

This release supports virtually all of the Unicode 13.0 Arabic character
repertoire (excluding the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks, which are
not recommended for normal use). Font smarts are implemented using OpenType
and Graphite technologies.

It builds those binary packages:

fonts-sil-scheherazadenew - Arabic script font designed in the
traditional Naskh style

To access further information about this font, please visit the
following URL:

https://software.sil.org/scheherazade/

Fabian Greffrath or Daniel Glassey can sponsor this package.

Debian already has the Scheherazade font in the package
fonts-sil-scheherazade. While the new font is an update from the old
font, the sizing of the characters has changed, which would change the
layout of existing documents. Therefore, a new package is proposed.

Regards,
Bobby

I do not see the source files for this font being released.
Please read at https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts#Source_Font_Formats what is considered a font source format in Debian.

So this has to go to non-free even if the binary fonts are freely licensed.

It looks to me like there are UFO sources at
https://github.com/silnrsi/font-scheherazade, which could potentially be
built with fontforge.

I don't fully understand the tooling needed to produce the expected font
files, but i think pysilfont (not currently packaged for debian, but
MIT-licensed, see https://bugs.debian.org/1032272) is likely needed for
some of the "preflight" steps and normalization.

I don't think Scheherazade New needs to go into non-free, and i would
very much like to have it available in debian main.  We just need to be
able to build it from source.

fwiw, i recommend naming the package (source and binary)
"fonts-scheherazade-new" -- the current practice in debian is to not
include the foundry name in the font package name.

It looks to me like there are UFO sources at
https://github.com/silnrsi/font-scheherazade, which could potentially be
built with fontforge.

I don't fully understand the tooling needed to produce the expected font
files, but i think pysilfont (not currently packaged for debian, but
MIT-licensed, see https://bugs.debian.org/1032272) is likely needed for
some of the "preflight" steps and normalization.

I don't think Scheherazade New needs to go into non-free, and i would
very much like to have it available in debian main.  We just need to be
able to build it from source.

fwiw, i recommend naming the package (source and binary)
"fonts-scheherazade-new" -- the current practice in debian is to not
include the foundry name in the font package name.