Need advice for Bug #

[Yasuaki Taniguchi/谷口康明]

Hello,

Thank you for discussing Japanese PDF specific problems.
This is very difficult typesetting problem.

> In general, I agree with Geert here. I don't think that we should need to include fonts in our distributions.
> I'll go even further: We shouldn't make our documentation dependent on any particular font.

If we're discussing about dynamically rendered file format, such as
html, mobi, epub, you're right. And it
is already accomplished. We don't need to specify fonts. Browsers will
dynamically calculate the place of characters and
render their glyphs.

On the other hand, if we're discussing PDF, the characters must be
located at the absolute position on the papers.
To calculate its position, we must specify fonts because metrics
(width and height) depend on fonts.

PDF/ISO 32000 specification defines that all PDF processor must handle
some Latin fonts, such as Times, Arial, Courier,
and Adobe provide them to all vendors. So we don't need to take care
of fonts and their licenses for Latin PDFs. But we implicitly specify
fonts.

PDF/ISO 32000 specification doesn't refer non-Latin fonts including
Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic and so on.
Adobe doesn't provide their fonts.

Many vendors provide Japanese fonts for their operation systems. For example,
Microsoft Windows: MS Mincho, MS Gothic, Meiryo,
Apple Mac OS X: Hiragino Mincho, Hiragino New Gothic,
Oracle Solaris: Heisei Mincho, Heisei Kaku Gotihc.

All of them are commercial fonts, and they are not permitted to use on
the other OSes. Moreover embedding to PDF is also
restricted. If we put PDFs on the GnuCash web site, we need to pay
license fee to the licensers.

IPA fonts are developed by IPA, Japanese governmental agency, to avoid
fonts license problem.

I only know Japanese cases, but if GnuCash documents are translated
into other languages, fonts license problem will be
happen, sooner or later.



2011/8/16 John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us>:
>
> On Aug 16, 2011, at 6:02 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:
>
>> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> gnucash-devel mailing list
>>> gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
>>> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
>>
>> 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.
>
> In general, I agree with Geert here. I don't think that we should need to include fonts in our distributions. I'll go even further: We shouldn't make our documentation dependent on any particular font. Obviously a Japanese font will be required to render Japanese text, but any Japanese user is going to have some already installed, and MacOSX comes with several regardless of whether the user needs them. I expect that's also true of MSWindows.
>
> I'll test the patch on a Mac and report back on the bug whether it works with the built in fonts.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>
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>



-- 
Yasuaki Taniguchi (谷口康明)
  yasuakit at gmail.com