Re: [PATCH RFC RESEND 0/4] Documentation: Web fonts for kernel documentation

[Ken Moffat]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2023 at 10:35:47AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:

Jon, some slight nit-picking below, after comments on the stated
problem.

> Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
[...]
> >
> > The solution
> > ============
> >
> > Uniform the font choices by leveraging web fonts. Most of people reading
> > the kernel docs should already have modern browser that supports this
> > feature (e.g. Chrome/Chromium and Firefox). The fonts are downloaded
> > automatically when loading the page, but only if the reader don't
> > already have ones installed locally. Subsequent docs page loading will
> > use the browser cache to retrieve the fonts. If for some reasons the
> > fonts fail to load, the browser will fall back to fallback fonts
> > commonly seen on other sites.
> 
Bagas,

If loading the web font fails, you will get whichever fallback
fonts are enabled by fontconfig and whichever fonts you, or your
distro, have installed.  If those fonts are not generally adequate
you should complain to your distro, or install different fonts in
~/.local/share/fotns and perhaps change your fonts.conf entries.

> So my immediate response to this is pretty uniformly negative.
> 
> - If you don't like serif, tweaking conf.py is easy enough without
>   pushing it on everybody else.
> 
> - I'm not thrilled about adding a bunch of binary font data to the
>   kernel, and suspect a lot of people would not feel that the bloat is
>   worth it.
> 

Jon,

As I understand it the (woff) fonts would be downloaded on request
by the browser if this went in.  So not a bunch of binary font data
in the kernel, but a download from google (adding to the popularity
of the font) and yet more font data in the browser cache.  I don't
have any desire to see woff fonts referenced in the docs, just
nit-picking about the details.

However -

> - The licensing of the fonts is not fully free.
> 

AFAICS, the SIL OFL allows everything except changing the font name.
If you have the right tools you can apparently fix things like "that
specific glyph looks ugly" or "you put a latin breve on a cyrillic
letter" (apparently they should differ) or "You mismapped this
codepoint to the wrong glyph". What you cannot do, if those changes
are not accepted by the font designer/maintainer, or if the font is
no-longer maintained, is fork it and provide it under the same name.

You can fork, but the font name has to be changed (e.g. LinLibertine
-> Libertinus and then the serif forked to CommonSerif).

Oh, and you cannot sell the fonts by themselves, but you can bundle
them with a distro or embed them.
https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/open-font-license-ofl-explained

Question: is that not free enough, or is that site wrong ?  If not
free enough, is there a better licence for fonts ?

ĸen
-- 
This is magic for grown-ups; it has to be hard because we know there's
no such thing as a free goblin.
   -- Pratchett, Stewart & Cohen - The Science of Discworld II