Souvenir would be used mostly for the sake of nostalgia, so if a
replacement font is not similar enough to evoke the same look and feel,
there's no reason to prefer it over any other serif font. I agree that it
would be best to use an free/open font, but so far we haven't found one
that would evoke the same feeling as Souvenir.
Jon
On Tue, 14 Mar 2017 at 14:31 <klaatu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2017-03-15 09:15, Jonathan Blake wrote:
On Tue, 14 Mar 2017 at 09:51 Ingo Kloecker
<projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Tuesday 14 March 2017 06:50:55 Klaatu wrote:
Hi Jon, so I just pushed a few things to SVN.
Here is what I pushed (it's all in the commit message, but I'm adding
it here anyway):
[...]
- I noticed that the font being requested by the epub build was called
"Calibiri", and that the fonts were located in some special directory
that was *not* included in the SVN repo. Two problems with this: 1)
the font is named Calibri (two i's, not three) and 2) the build
breaks on local machines unless you have the fonts located in the
correct path (in other words, external dependency). Furthermore,
since the font was misnamed in the build scripts, the font never
actually gets included in the build, making any effort to resolve the
font path moot.
So what I did was this:
1. changed the font path to an internal font path (trunk/common/font/)
2. bundled an open source clone of Calibri called Carlito into SVN (I
included the license, as well, so there is documentation that the
font is open source and free to bundle)
3. s/Calibiri/Carlito/ in all CSS files
It is my intent that nothing should be negatively affected by this
change, and in fact that future contributors won't have to think about
how to resolve font errors, because we are bundling the font with the
build.
It's good that we can do this for the FW books. For the LW books (at
least for the PDF versions) we want to use the Souvenir font which
isn't
a free font. Therefore we haven't put the Souvenir font files that we
have bought into SVN.
So, I think it would be good if both font locations were considered.
Or,
if we made the font path configurable by adding it to the Makefiles of
the individual books (or to common series-specific Makefiles to reduce
duplication).
I agree on this point. We need the flexibility to also be able to
access
fonts not committed to SVN.
- A new Highway Holocaust cover art based on an illustration from
within the book. The design is just something I threw together; it's
a little different from the Lone Wolf style, but then again this is a
different universe entirely. If people hate it, I'm happy to base it
on the Lone Wolf template.
Hmm. Playing Devil's advocate (though IANAL), I'm not sure whether we
have
the right to create derivative works from the original
illustrations.
I reviewed the PA license again. While it doesn't explicitly grant us
the
ability to create derivative works, it allows for the possibility of
derivative works being sent back to PA by the licensee, so it seems to
look
forward to the possibility of PA distributing these derivative works
(otherwise why allow people to send derivative works to us?). That's
not
the most ironclad reasoning, but I think it's enough. Thoughts?
Klaatu, thanks for working on this!
--
Jon
Thanks for the feedback, Ingo and Jon.
Ingo has clarified one thing: I didn't even realise, from the build
script error output that 'Souvenir' was the name of a font. I thought it
was a directory name that someone had arbitrarily given to the font
directory on their build computer. Now it makes a lot more sense.
I'll revise my changes to allow for a font path override, or failing
that, I'll revert it to what was there previously.
To make the build system future-proof, it seems better for it to be
self-contained. Is there a similar but open-licensed font that we could
swap Souvenir with so that future builders of these books don't have to
hunt down and acquire Souvenir? I'll admit to not being a font snob, and
maybe Souvenir is being used for historical accuracy, but
https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/source-serif-pro is a similar
rounded-serif font, with an Open Font License so it could be safely
bundled. No more hunting down font dependencies for a successful build.
That said, it's just a proposal. In the mean time, I'll look at changing
the build script to being more flexible, or else revert it to what it
was, and deal with the calib[i]ri issues in another way.
Thanks again, guys.
