Some feedback on STIX fonts

Dear sir, Fist of all, I'd like to thank STIX for releasing its fonts for public use. We've been distributing it as a default component in Fedora Linux since Fedora 10: http://fedoraproject.org/ They will probably percolate from Fedora to Red Hat Enterprise Linux this year. We are also very happy about your decision to drop a custom licence for the standard OFL font licence. I regret that you didn't change your font naming to something more human friendly during the beta. Applications have been tested against Times New Roman for years, there is no reason to stick to Postscript-like whitespace-free names any more. In a related problem, STIX declares a lot of different font names, consuming a lot of precious space in application font lists. Could you please try to cut down a little here? Or at least provide guidance to distributors on the minimal font set they can distribute as default that is sufficient to display engineering text without taking so much place in font lists? Lastly, a plain text *.txt licensing file would be appreciated, as the current PDF one is a bit bulky. Now, as part of Fedora's ongoing QA work, we run automated sanity tests on all the font files shipped in the distribution. It is very important that all our fonts, especially those installed by default, pass those tests with minimal warnings. Our ability to collect font problems in the field is limited (most users do not report the font problems they experience) and we have to rely on automated testing. Moreover we've found out that most foundries do not test for the same problems as us. Therefore our testing usually complements nicely the one performed by font authors, and makes it a free service to thank them for releasing Free/Libre/Open fonts. This testing found several problems in STIX fonts. This is not surprising for such a young font set, but we'd be grateful if you could look at them and confirm we made the right choice in selecting STIX as a default typeface. I've attached the full test logs to this message. As a quick summary, we've found two classes of problems that need fixing your side: * Various fontlint errors. Fontlint is the font testing suite created by the fontforge project. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/fontlint.html Fedora, OpenOffice.org, and others, have been adding new tests to fontlint whenever a bad font broke an application on our platforms. (see the fontlint data files in attached logs) * Partial script coverage. We understand that creating a typeface that covers the whole Unicode range is an enormous amount of work and not something that can reasonably be asked of most font authors. Therefore our test limits itself to detecting almost-complete scripts, and only triggers when less than ten glyphs are necessary to complete one or more of them (very often it triggers on the few diacritics necessary to support minority languages). Thus our test identifies areas where only a little more work can make the font files useful for many more people. Please use this opportunity to improve your fonts. (see the fc-query data files in attached logs, and the explanation in summary.txt) We also run unicode block coverage tests, but they are a lot less useful in practice (see the unicover data files in attached logs) I hope this feedback will be of some use to the STIX projet. Once again, thank you very much for releasing this wonderful free/libre/open font set! Best regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot Fedora fonts special interest group http://fonts.fedoraproject.org/