Hi all, I understand both sides. I will try to put some clarification.
It is not true that GNU FreeFont cannot be uninstalled from TeX Live without removing a lot of packages. The magic is to use the -force switch. It will uninstall just the font without taking dependences into account and when other packages are later updated, tlmgr will say "skipping forcibly removed package" and will not install it again. This is the way how I do it. Now you know how to remove the installed version, so you just have to fetch it from svn, build it and install it. However, a great many users are not programmers, they do not know how to install fontforge and how to run make. And Windows users most probably do not have GNU utilities, they even do not have a subversion client unless they are experienced programmers developing free software. Four years ago sombody complained that Devanagari in FreeFont is absolutely unusable. I found that he was right and you wrote that without bug reports you are not able to fix it. I started sending you explanations and you worked hard to make everything working. The official release of May 2012 found its way to TeX Live 2012 and everything worked fine. Afterwards ICU became unmaintained and TeX Live 2013 switched to HarfBuzz. Since that time Devanagari in FreeFont ceased to work. I have just looked at the log of my tests and I see that you have fixed all issuse by April 7, 2013 (this is the date of my test). Now the problem is that there is a beautifull font with functional Devanagari but the official released version is more than two years old and does not work since the release of TeX Live 2013. On the contrary, if you install TeX Live 2012 or 2011, remove its FreeFont and use the version from svn, Devanagari still works fine. I am in a bad situation myself. I have to do a job for linguists. They can use XeTeX but they are not programmers, they are unable to tweak installation on their computers. I have to prepare a system so that they can use Devanagari and a lot of different marks. All necessary characters are present in FreeFont and are probably missing in other free fonts. It leads me to a dilemma whether I should explain them how to use subversion, how to install fontforge, how to install all the GNU stuff on Windows computers and what is the danger of using the HEAD of the svn repository. Being a developer I know that there may be a good reason for comitting a totally broken revision because it may be useful to perserve it and the developer has no time to fix all bugs at that moment. Thus it is not a good idea to blindly package the HEAD of the svn repository without running at least all my tests available here: http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/xetex-test/ I do not guarantee that everything is covered in these tests. Even if all tests pass, the font may still be broken somewhere else. It would be nice if those users, who need high quality Devanagari typesetting, could easily get GNU FreeFont working with TL 2013 and later without the risk that they may receive a broken version. Steve, you have done a lot of work, the Devanagari block is functional and the glyphs are beautifull. One of my books was typeset with FreeSans and highly educated readers in India like it. Thus I believe that the result of your work should be somehow accessible to normal users who are unable to build the font themselves from svn. Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz 2014-12-18 9:28 GMT+01:00 Dominik Wujastyk <wujas...@gmail.com>: > Nobody is talking about responsibility or blame. Actually, everyone is > extremely grateful for and appreciative of everything you have done and are > doing with FreeFont! > > The 2012 version of the fonts is seriously broken for Devanagari users. But > it's co-installed with several other TeX Live packages, and causes a lot of > trouble for anyone doing Indian typesetting. Over the last couple of years > we've seen this problem surfacing again and again with Indian script users > who think that XeTeX is broken. Only some of these disappointed and > frustrated users actually get as far as reporting to this list. > > You have fixed the Devanagari font problems (ICU>Harfbuzz), which is great, > and everyone is extremely grateful. And your fixes are there in SVN. But > that's not enough, because fetching and installing the 2014 Freefonts from > SVN still leaves the TeX Live problem. One can't uninstall gnu-freefonts > from TeX Live without ripping out a lot of other dependent packages, and the > whole situation becomes very hard to manage, even for sophisticated users. > Again, we've seen numerous complaints and reports here in the list from > users who unwittingly end up with multiple versions of gnu-freefonts on > their disks, and wonder why XeTeX is still behaving badly when they have > installed the SVN release of gnu-freefonts. > > What Norbert has done, at my request, is to to provide an elegant temporary > solution relating to TeX Live for this problem for advanced users who are > comfortable using the SVN version of FreeFonts and understand that there may > be other difficulties in doing so, even if the Devanagari situation is > improved. This is, in fact, to do with TeX Live, and not so much > gnu-freefonts itself. > > What about this as a way forward? On my blog, I'll put very loud warnings > that this TeX Live fix is about the SVN version of gnu-freefonts, that it's > not meant for production use, that users may encounter unintended > consequences, and that they are responsible for themselves. I could even > say that this fix is deprecated. > > As long as gnu-freefonts are packaged with TeX Live, forking the code would > help nobody and would add a fresh level of confusion for users. > > There may even be a benefit: if a few more sophisticated TeX Live users > start using your SVN code, you may get some helpful feedback and bug reports > that you wouldn't otherwise have received. > > Best, > Dominik > > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex