Need advice for Bug #

[Geert Janssens]

On zaterdag 13 augustus 2011, Cristian Marchi wrote:
> I need an advice about the bug in object [1]. The patch that Yasuki
> submitted needs the creation in the guide/ja_JP folder of an ipaexafont
> folder containing the files downloaded from
> http://ossipedia.ipa.go.jp/ipafont/index.html. If these files and folder
> are not present, the pdf generation is broken. My question is: can I
> submit to the gnucash documentation repo the font files downloaded from
> the previous link? I haven't yet carefully read the license file.
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> Cristian
> 
> [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654467
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Hi Cristian and Yasuaki,

I'm not really up to speed regarding non-western languages, but here are my 
thoughts on the subject.

For starters, I presume most people interested in the Japanese documentation 
will have some Japanese font on their PC's. I presume they installed such a 
font for reading among others Japanese websites. Are the ipa fonts common to 
be installed on those people's PC's (not only on linux and friends but also on 
OS X or Windows for example) ?

Do I understand it correctly that the ipa fonts are used to create the PDF's 
only ? Asked otherwise, how do the winhelp and html version of the 
documentation display the Japanese translation ?

In principle, I don't think our documentation svn tree should include the 
fonts. They are generally available in most distributions.

Our documentation build system is autotools based. Following that concept we 
should check for our requirements at configure time (in configure.in). We 
could choose there to either fail to configure if the font is not available on 
the system, or to simply disable the generation of the Japanese pdf output, 
with an instructive warning that the font is required for the Japanese pdf 
output.

The Windows build system and the OS X build system are somewhat particular in 
that they both automatically download all dependencies. It's up to either 
maintainer to decide how to solve the font issue. It can probably be 
downloaded as part of the automatic dependency download and be used from there 
on.

I'm curious how the other devs see this.

In any case if needed, I can help with figuring out how to implement these 
checks in the configure script.

Geert