Re: [Freefont-bugs] Next release of GNU Free Fonts with Open Type MATH support?

[Steve White]

Hi, Frédéric,

Yes, I did experiment with the MATH table around that time.  I'm
afraid I didn't really know what I was doing, and I haven't looked at
it until just yesterday (when somebody mentioned it to me.)

I would be glad to see a good test of math rendering capabilites.
Particularly, table entries that I thought should produce extensible
over-hat and over-tilde are apparently not being applied--and I've
tried it many different ways.  Can you tell what's wrong?

The plan is to release FreeFont when all known problems are resolved,
and releasing it doesn't break any existing applications that are
working right (to the best of our knowledge).  It is now in no such
state.

The biggest, global problem was that FreeFont supports several Indic
scripts.  Most of these were working (to the best of our testing
abilities) at the time of the 2012 release, but the shift to the
Harfbuzz renderer just months after took us by surprise.  It's a big
improvement, but it broke everything.  We've put a great deal of work
into bringing it up to date.  One of these scripts is still badly
broken, and one remains to be tested by a native speaker.

But this is only one class of problems.  There are others.

I hope you can be satisfied with "in coming months".

Thanks!

On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Frédéric Wang <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Someone recently asked me to add GNU FreeSerif to the list of default
> fonts for my MathML font settings addon [1]. It turns out that,
> according to the changelog, a MATH table was added in November 2013 ;
> which means that it can be used for the MathML rendering in Gecko >= 31
> [2]. This is great news since GNU FreeSerif seems to be
> available/preinstalled in most Linux distributions and so that would
> avoid the need for users to manually install math font [3]. However, the
> latest release of GNU FreeSerif was in 2012, which leads to the
> following question: when will the next version of GNU FreeSerif be released?
>
> Thanks,
>
> [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mathml-font-settings/
> [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/31.0/releasenotes/
> [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/MathML_Project/Fonts
>
>
> --
> Frédéric Wang
> maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic
>
>