This official patch http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=0ec6f335-c3de-44c5-a13d-a1e7cea5ddea&displaylang=en doesn't seem to be applied to the current corefonts package. Specifically, Romanian letters S and T with comma underneath (U+0218, U+0219, U+021A and U+021B) look damaged with Arial, namely no anti-aliasing, contrastingly light appearance, different size. Furthermore, with Times New Roman, Trebuchet and Verdana, these Romanian letters seem borrowed from another typeface because they are not built starting from the regular S and T. On the contrary, the *_wrong_* but widely used S and T with cedillas underneath (U+015E, U+015F, U+0162 and U+0163) look very consistent with the regular S and T! The very same goes for the other font families included in the corefonts package. Unfortunately, the patch does not seem to address them. Bulgarian letters U+040D and U+045D do not exist at all with Arial, Times New Roman, Trebuchet and Verdana. All these font families should be fixed by applying the mentioned patch. I must admit I'm not sure about what the license permits. The Microsoft wording suggests that other font families do not need repairs - what does corefonts actually wrap? I don't know about Bulgarian characters, but as far as the Romanian ones are concerned, this is a HISTORIC REPARATION. Thank you. Reproducible: Always
Can anyone say if the submitted microsoft patch is applicable to the corefonts package, at least?
Folks, I forgot to point out that this undertaking is not made for academic corectness' sake, but because this issue makes all applications translated into Romanian look ugly or even broken, when Microsoft's core fonts are used. And I mean all of them (LibreOffice, the Mozilla family, KDE, you name it). If you need to reproduce it, just add "ro" in LINGUAS, set your KDE fonts to (say) Arial and check the KDE Kickoff menu in Romanian... The S and T letters with comma underneath are simply missing from screen.
Any news, please?
That executable is actually a cab file that contains updated fonts: $ cabextract EUupdate.EXE Extracting cabinet: EUupdate.EXE extracting Arial.ttf extracting ArialBd.ttf extracting ArialBI.ttf extracting ArialI.ttf extracting fontinst.exe extracting Times.ttf extracting TimesBd.ttf extracting TimesBI.ttf extracting TimesI.ttf extracting Verdana.ttf extracting Verdanab.ttf extracting Verdanai.ttf extracting Verdanaz.ttf extracting trebucit.ttf extracting trebuc.ttf extracting trebucbd.ttf extracting trebucbi.ttf extracting fontinst.inf New fonts are added corefonts-1-r6.ebuild. @licenses: what do you think is it possible to use this new file with the same license as old files? Actually if I remember correctly license was always questionable for this package and since there is no new lincense in this package I've added corefonts-1-r6 with new fonts. Still I'd like you to be aware about this and may be review this work. TIA.
Sorry for the delayed reply. Thanks for updating corefonts! I knew the EXE file was a cabinet file, I tested that and saw the bare *.ttf files. Regarding the license, I also wrote to the guy (I think his name is Noa Resare) who own the corefonts project on SF, on the 5th of May 2011. No reply, so far - I believe he has abandoned the project. Anyway, I believe this EU update won't cause any licensing questions, at least not more than there might already be with the corefonts package. This Noa guy seems pretty sure he's not violating anything, see http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ Also, note that Noa also found 5 (!) years ago a legal path to obtain the Tahoma font family (just "uncab" the first file from http://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/files/the fonts/final/). It makes a good future improvement for Gentoo's corefonts, doesn't it? Thanks again!
