Bug#970357: fonts-adf-tribun: Inappropriate ligatures for ae and oe

[Mikko Rasa]

On 29.9.2020 11.49, Nathan Willis wrote:

Actually, don't mean to make assumptions — did you already try reaching out
to upstream? Worth a shot, IMO.


I hadn't before your message.  I did so shortly afterwards, but have yet 
to receive a response.  I need to get a publication using these fonts 
out the door very soon, so it's likely I'll have to edit the fonts 
myself.  I can contribute the edited files to Debian in the event the 
upstream proves unresponsive.


--
Mikko

Bug#970357: fonts-adf-tribun: Inappropriate ligatures for ae and oe

[Nathan Willis]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 8:54 AM Mikko Rasa  wrote:

> Recent versions of the ADF fonts contain an rlig (required ligatures) table
> which replaces the letters ae with æ and oe with œ.  This is incorrect for
> at
> least Finnish and English and probably many other languages as well.  I
> know
> Norwegian uses the ligated versions as separate letters, but I'm not sure
> if
> the non-ligated letter combination also appears (and so if the ligature
> substitution could actually change the meaning of the text).
>
> I'm not convinced that the ligatures are useful, since languages where
> those
> ligated letters are used are typically able to enter the relevant Unicode
> characters directly from the keyboard.  And having them as required
> ligatures
> is definitely wrong since there are many examples of using those letters
> separately.
>

Hi Mikko,

Personally, I would concur with your assessment that by making the
ligatures required, people get output text that is, shall we say,
"orthographically incorrect".

However, at the project level, it seems like this is a design decision made
by Arkandis. There's always *some* gray area between "it's a bug in the
font" and "it's a weird-but-intentional design decision that makes the font
a poor choice" and you might find that Arkandis believes (convincingly or
not) that they have the right to make that design decision Like, if the
intent was to have a font that resembles ancient Latin inscriptions, it
might just be that you won't persuade them to change the feature settings.

I would highly encourage you to take the issue, as you've described it, to
Arkandis directly. I think citing the confusion for real-world languages is
the strongest possible argument. So they might be willing to move the
substitutions into a more appropriate feature like hlig or a stylistic
set That's worth a try because fixing it upstream would fix it for
other users.

If that doesn't work, the package is "GPL2 WITH Font-Exemption" so at least
it is functionally patchable. But upstream fixes would be better.

Actually, don't mean to make assumptions — did you already try reaching out
to upstream? Worth a shot, IMO.

Nate


-- 
nathan.p.willis
nwil...@glyphography.com 

Bug#970357: fonts-adf-tribun: Inappropriate ligatures for ae and oe

[Mikko Rasa]

Package: fonts-adf-tribun
Version: 0.20190904-2
Severity: normal

Recent versions of the ADF fonts contain an rlig (required ligatures) table
which replaces the letters ae with æ and oe with œ.  This is incorrect for at
least Finnish and English and probably many other languages as well.  I know
Norwegian uses the ligated versions as separate letters, but I'm not sure if
the non-ligated letter combination also appears (and so if the ligature
substitution could actually change the meaning of the text).

I'm not convinced that the ligatures are useful, since languages where those
ligated letters are used are typically able to enter the relevant Unicode
characters directly from the keyboard.  And having them as required ligatures
is definitely wrong since there are many examples of using those letters
separately.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.6.3-k8 (SMP w/24 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en 
(charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)

-- no debconf information