Re: Skyfonts

[David Kastrup]

"Andrew Bernard" <address@hidden> writes:

> Greetings All,
>
>  
>
> I would be keen to know if anybody has any current thoughts on how to make
> lilypond able to use typographical fonts from Skyfonts. There was a
> discussion about this in the user list some time ago, with no resolution.
> Skyfonts hides the fonts quite thoroughly from sight yet they are available
> for programs on Windows and Mac. I am aware that people get into political
> discourse about the concepts of the font company owning the fonts and
> intellectual property issues and freedom of software and so on, which is all
> well and good. But the fact is that Skyfonts with a Monotype subscription is
> an immensely powerful and useful computing asset.

The GNU project maintainer guidelines state at
<https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Platforms>:

    However, a feature that runs only on other systems and not on GNU or
    GNU/Linux makes no sense in a GNU package.

> I wondering if people have any current thoughts on how these fonts
> could be integrated into use by lilypond.

Not into LilyPond as a GNU project.  If you want to maintain private
extensions that are not part of LilyPond itself, that is up to you as
long as you heed the license of LilyPond (I don't know whether the
Skyfont mechanisms can be accessed in a way compatible with the GPLv3
requirements though).

> I suppose this issue is really to do with the fontconfig machinery
> lilypond uses. Why can't fontconfig use fonts that other programs on
> the system can see?

You may want to take this issue up with fontconfig then.  As far as I
know, it is not a GNU project and thus not bound by the same
considerations.

-- 
David Kastrup