Some feedback on your PT Sans fonts

Dear sir, Fist of all, I'd like to thank ParaType for releasing PT Sans for public use. We've started distributing it as a default component in Fedora Linux since Fedora 13: http://fedoraproject.org/ Depending on the feedback we receive it may find its way in derived Linux distributions (OLPC, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc). I must say that your release of PT Sans under the OFL font license helps a lot. The OFL is a licence we know and respect, and our legal people are not happy about one-of-a-kind licences such as the PT Free Font Licence you used at first. 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 PT Sans. This is not surprising for such a young font, but we'd be grateful if you could look at them and confirm we made the right choice in selecting PT Sans as a default font. I've attached the full test logs to this mail. As a quick summary, we've found three classes of problems: * Bad font metadata. PT Sans font naming does not respect Microsoft's WWS font naming guidelines. It is a big problem for us as Linux does not perform automated font name fixing like Windows Vista or Seven. We suggest the following naming change in your OpenType/WWS metadata fields: PT Sans Narrow, Bold → Pt Sans, SemiCondensed Bold PTN77F.ttf [paratype-pt-sans-fonts] PT Sans Narrow, Regular → Pt Sans, SemiCondensed PTN57F.ttf [paratype-pt-sans-fonts] See also: http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx * 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 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). 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 fc-query results in attached logs, and the explanation in summary.txt) I hope this feedback will be of some use to ParaType. Best regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot Fedora fonts special interest group http://fonts.fedoraproject.org/