font ports?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 30, 2015, at 4:28 AM, René J.V. Bertin wrote:

> The reasons I've been considering fonts ports :
> - doxygen uses a css style that calls for Google's Roboto font. Not necessarily as a "hard" dependency, though documentation created in Qt's help format *will* use the font if available.

If we're talking about HTML documents, then those HTML documents should use Google's web fonts:

<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>


> - I'm working on ports for KF5, and one of them ("frameworkintegration") specifically mentions that the Noto and Oxygen Mono fonts are expected to be installed.
> 
> It would be nice to be able to install those fonts via MacPorts if the dependents are obtained that way too.
> 
> In both cases it'd require a *lot* of hacking to get those fonts to be found in a location that's not supported by the OS, hacking of a kind even I don't feel comfortable proposing as a port patch.
> 
> As to licensing issues ... the same principles apply that apply to other kinds of ports. Everyone can make a port that redistributes code that isn't supposed to be; it's up to MacPorts to prevent such ports from being included in the official repository. The fonts I mention can be redistributed, and ports could probably be written such that the font files are downloaded from the official repository rather than from a MacPorts mirror.

Fonts are usually distributed under different licenses than software. Google Noto and Oxygen Mono are licensed under OFL-1.1, which is a font-specific license that MacPorts hasn't been taught about yet, but it claims to be an OSI-approved license. Google Roboto is licensed under Apache-2 which of course we know about already.