Dear T-om
David forwarded your message to me.
We are happy to hear that you wish to package the THDL "Tibetan Machine Uni" font for Debian Linux.
A couple of things:
1) perhaps you could use a slightly less generic name for the package since there will be other GPL'd OpenType Tibetan fonts - maybe call it "ttf-tibetan-machine-uni" or "ttf-tibetan-thdl-uni" - unless you plan to include all tibetan fonts in one package.
Another related issue is that there are a number of older Tibetan ttf fonts floating around which do not have glyphs mapped to the proper Unicode Tibetan characters or have OpenType tables necessary for forming tibetan conjuncts. (There is even an earlier non-Unicode version of the Tibetan Machine font available.) We want to make sure that older (non Unicode) Tibetan fonts which rely on non-standard glyph based Tibetan character encodings are not confused with this font as this could cause all kinds of confusion & problems for users.
2) the current version of THDL's Tibetan Machine Unicode font is an alpha version with known limitations. None of these is disastrous but the font currently won't render as nicely as it should and quite a few of the rarer Tibetan-Sanskrit ligatures are not yet supported.
We plan to release a more up-to-date (beta) version of the font with these things fixed in about a month. Including a package for the current version in the 'unstable' branch is OK - but please make sure it is clearly marked as an alpha version - and, if you do this, we would hope any package gets updated to the new version as soon as that is available.
People installing this font will probably need to install a keyboard to input Tibetan script. The dz or bo keyboard in XFree 86 should work.
Only the latest version of Pango (1.8.0) has support for Tibetan script so anyone wishing to use this font in applications which rely on Pango or GTK+ will need to update Pango as well.
Under Linux Tibetan script rendering is not yet supported in Mozilla, OpenOffice or ICU. There is limited support for Tibetan in in KDE/Qt.
best regards
- Chris Fynn
David Germano wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of t-om Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2005 12:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Started packaging TMU for Debian
dear THDL project,
i would like to inform you that packaging the Tibetan Machine Uni font for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution has been started. the package name will probably be ttf-tibetan and it will be first included in the 'unstable' distribution. the intention to create the package is documented at [0].
[0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=293688
please let me know if this intention somehow contradicts your own plans.
and thanks for the font. i'm using it with the yudit editor while learning tibetan at the university of helsinki.
best regards, -- t-om <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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