[tex-live] TeX Live and GNU FreeFont

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi all,

I want to open a question of GNU FreeFont that should be clarified before
TL 2015 gets frozen for DVD. As we know, the latest official release is
quite old and its Devanagari block does not work with HarfBuzz. On the
other hand, the Devanagari block in the subversion repository is OK (I will
test it soon with TL 2015 pretest in order to be sure). This means that one
of the most beautiful Devanagari fonts is not officially available to
normal users. Some time ago TL 2014 started to distribute GNU FreeFont from
the head of the svn repository. This seems to be good news for users but
bad news for font developers. I see two possibilities:

1. If the font is ready for an official release, it would be good to
release it before TL is frozen for DVD production

2. If there are still too things to be resolved before release, we should
take advantage of the possibility of several TL repositories. The standard
repository should contain the officially released FreeFont while an
additional repository will contain FreeFont from the head of the svn repo.
The advantage is that those who prefer a stable font and do not need
Devanagari will not configure this additional TL repo. Those who need
Devanagari and are prepared to take the risk that the font does not work
will configure this additional repository.

Is this reasonable?

Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20150415/89a8558c/attachment.html>