Package: ttf-indic-fonts
Version: 1:0.3.9
Severity: important
The Tikkana font (for Telugu) is not compatible with Unicode, but
one of the many pre-Unicode webfonts with a hacky ad-hoc encoding.
Neither are its glyphs in the correct Unicode code points, nor
does it contain any of the needed OpenType features. That makes
it useless in a Unicode environment, and in the worst case, the
Telugu glyphs that it incorrectly packs in the ASCII range might
in some circumstances show up instead of the correct ASCII glyphs,
garbling regular English text.
Please consider reverting to the Pothana2000 Telugu font. See bug
#292744 for the change from Pothana2000 to Tikkana, and notice the
sad irony in the title of that bug ("Pothana font replaced by
Tikkana because Pothana doesn't conform to ISO-8859-1"): it is
Tikkana that does not conform to ISO-8859-1, since it incorrectly
puts Telugu glyphs in the ISO-8859-1 codepoints. Pothana2000, on
the other hand, always conformed with ISO-8859-1 by conforming to
its superset and successor, Unicode.
The Pothana2000 font is distributed at
http://www.kavya-nandanam.com/dload.htm
It comes under the GPL, but upstream should still be contacted
about the following licensing issues:
1. The website has wordage that, while not explicitly non-free,
seems to insinuate some sort of dislike of commercial use of
the font:
You can use this font freely for your personal use, and
you can publish material created with this font after
giving due credit to me ...
The GPL presumably overrides these undertones, but only if
the person who added the GPL license actually held the
copyright to the font and was thus entitled to do so.
2. The font is marked as nonÂeditable. When opening it in
Fontforge, the following dialogue is displayed:
This font is marked with an FSType of 2 (Restricted
License). That means it is not editable without the
permission of the legal owner.
Do you have such permission?
Yes No
The copyright holder of the font needs to be contacted to
change this. The archived bug #254246 promised to
accomplish this. Apparently it hasn't happened, so that bug
should never have been closed in the first place.
Thanks for your help,
Stefan Baums
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages ttf-indic-fonts depends on:
ii defoma 0.11.8-0.1 Debian Font Manager -- automatic f
-- no debconf information
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