severity 584672 wishlist close 584672
thanks Samuel, I am changing the severity of this to "wishlist" because this is not a real bug. Unifont conforms to The Unicode Standard. It did in 2008 and it does now. The current Unifont doesn't even contain the glyphs mentioned in this bug report so I am closing it. I took the time to email you about the earlier glyphs following explicit suggestions of The Unicode Standard for Unicode fonts. For example, see Section 5.3 of the Standard. I verified my correct interpretation of Unicode in 2008 before releasing those glyphs by asking The Unicode Consortium. I verified again in 2013 that those glyphs still conformed to the latest Unicode Standard, and they do. However, those glyphs are no longer even a part of Unifont so there is no point in re-opening this bug. This is after your derisive and untrue comment about my work being "bogus" as well. That followed the abusive "tofu" insult made previously in this thread, so maybe you thought from that precedent that such provocation was acceptable. I don't. I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, and so five months ago offered in good faith to let you participate in the packaging of a new version along with Paul Wise. In particular, I wanted Paul to have the opportunity to see Unifont packaged the way he wanted. Neither of you took me up on the offer. I've already put the effort in to convert the package to the new dh mechanism and then converted it to the quilt format. There's nothing left to do Debian packaging-wise. Then in December, while making sure I had properly closed a bug that someone filed on Ubuntu in September, I saw that you created a "Unifont Team" with yourself as owner/moderator (with your lack of understanding of The Unicode Standard) and me as a member. That created a false public impression that somehow you and I were on some sort of team together, which has never been true. It also carried the implication that I endorsed what you did, which was also not the case. After emailing you about that with no response from you, I removed myself from that "Team" page to bring an end to such misrepresentation. There are tens of thousands of packages in Debian. Why not find one that interests you whose maintainer's work you have not insulted. A package where you haven't created the false impression that you and the maintainer were on some sort of team together. One whose associated standards you'll put in the time to learn. There's bound to be a few hundred packages that would meet such selection criteria. Evidently others in the Debian font group were not that familiar with The Unicode Standard either. Before Unicode 6.0 it was necessary to purchase a physical copy of the latest standard, which I had been doing over the years. That was an expense most people obviously would not want to incur; those books weren't cheap. However, The Unicode Standard is now available as a free PDF download from http://unicode.org so there's no reason for those who have a sincere interest in Unicode not to educate themselves. I also had conflicting requests from the Fontforge community. Unifont is the font of last resort for Fontforge. Because Fontforge is used to create new free fonts, the Fontforge/Unifont combination has a multiplying factor. So I weigh the wishes of Fontforge users very heavily. Some Fontforge users wanted to retain the shaded box glyphs for unassigned code points exactly because they followed a Unicode recommendation, mimicking the appearance of the Unicode code charts. One person had a very strong opinion about this and gave me a number of reasons for keeping the glyphs as they were in 2008. With Paul Wise not taking me up on my offer to participate in packaging the new version the way he wanted, I asked the GNU/Linux Fontforge community which they preferred for the appearance of unassigned glyphs. Knowing there were conflicting wishes among users, I took the trouble of creating a poll on my website, deciding to implement whatever the majority who voted wanted. I offered five choices: the default on whatever GNU/Linux windowing system they were using (listed as the first choice to give it the most prominence), or the new hexadecimal glyphs I had created, or the original shaded box from 2008, or two other variants of shaded boxes with wider stripes. I also emailed Paul Wise, inviting him to participate in the poll so his vote would be counted. I don't know who specifically did or did not vote in the poll though; it was anonymous. I needed to resolve this quickly because Fontforge was preparing its most major release in a couple of years at the end of December. That was just a few weeks from my putting the poll online. I needed to freeze a version of Unifont that the Fontforge team could rely upon quickly. You can see the results of the poll here: http://unifoundry.com/poll_unassigned/index.php. I thought there would be more voting but it trailed off to almost nothing after the first day. Most GNU/Linux Fontforge users wanted the new hexadecimal glyphs I had created, more than all other options combined. So I went with that option and released the font a couple of weeks in advance of the scheduled major Fontforge release. The new glyphs still conform to The Unicode Standard, following a different suggestion. This is also mentioned, for example, in Section 5.3 of The Unicode Standard. In any case they are not the subject of this particular bug report. For others reading this: I did not produce a new release for several years because I was creating a new Hangul Syllables block from scratch. That block has 11,172 glyphs and was a monumental undertaking. Twice I had found that the set I was already using in Unifont could not be licensed under the GNU GPL. I wanted the whole font to be licensed under the GPL to remove any obstacle to Unifont formally becoming part of the GNU Project. This was also a wish of Unifont's creator, Roman Czyborra. I only mentioned those preparations for the GNU Project to one other person besides Roman until it was a done deal. I didn't want to claim it would happen until it actually did. I simply explained to others that I was redrawing the Hangul Syllables block to get the whole font under the GNU GPL. I couldn't find an acceptable substitute set of glyphs for that block under the GNU GPL, and wanted to be certain there would never be any contention about their licensing. So I decided to take on the task of creating these 11,172 Hangul Syllables glyphs myself completely from scratch. I made a couple of false starts, mainly because I did not understand the many nuances Koreans follow in aligning letters within a Hangul syllable. It wound up taking me a few years more than I thought it would as a result. The approach I finally used is documented here: http://unifoundry.com/hangul/hangul-generation.html. Had this been for any other effort besides GNU given the difficulties encountered, I would have just left things as they were. Because of GNU I kept at it. Finally in the summer of 2013, the main native Korean reviewer who was working with me gave my results her seal of approval. I had been working with her for at least a couple of years in critiquing my Hangul renderings. A number of people emailed me privately during this period and I explained the situation to them. Some gave me contributions, and I have been going through a backlog of changes and additions since the first Unifont 6.3 release. I also made changes in some glyphs in the past that I have yet to incorporate into the released version. Fortunately I will never have to draw a block of over 11,000 glyphs again. I am finishing the proposed Unicode 7.0 Basic Multilingual Plane glyphs now but won't release them until the formal release of The Unicode Standard version 7.0. There are currently only 2,325 unassigned glyphs in the Unicode 6.3 Basic Multilingual Plane. There should be fewer than 2,000 unassigned glyphs in the BMP once Unicode 7.0 is released. Thus out of the 64k code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, having these hexadecimal unassigned glyphs just adds a few percent to the size of the uncompressed font, which is insignificant. In the end, this is just one font. I have catered to the wishes of the GRUB and especially Fontforge communities, but there will never be perfect agreement among all. There are thousands of other fonts that are true outline fonts with much nicer rendering than Unifont. No one font could possibly satisfy everyone in every way. If this font doesn't suit you (and I expect it would not suit most people for constant use), there is a vast array of alternatives.
