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foponts FAQ

Why foponts and what does it mean?

Because it's quite simple and sounds good :)

The name of the project is originated and formed from the name of the Apache project ("FOP") and a word "fonts".

Why foponts was created?

Short answer: to make things easy.

Long answer: The author of the foponts project is a technical writer/documentation engineer by profession. He primary uses DocBook/XML as a source for documentation (of course, he sometimes also uses lightweight markup languages like asciidoc, ReStructured text, Markdown).

To get a .pdf files from DocBook sources the most affordable (actually, free) software is FOP from Apache Software Foundation.

The problem was, that an earlier versions of FOP (v.0.93 - v.1.0, within a period of 2007-2009) needed to be configured hardly to work with the characters beyond the ordinary Latin alphabet (author widely uses documents with a Cyrillic alphabet).

Moreover, after implementing fonts autodetect feature (<auto-detect/>) in a later versions of FOP, rendering results became totally unpredictable. That is because autodetection feature discovers fonts to use within local machine but fonts sets can differ from machine to machine. That led to a situation when one document with the same text and structure looked different while rendering on a machine X and on a server Y.

To take a rendering process under full control author decided to create a configuration file that gives totally predictable result for rendering documents irrespective the machine and/or server used for a rendering process.

As a result:

  • rendered PDF documents uses only fonts that are available, well known, pre-checked for visual impression and character sets (Cyrillic, Greek, etc);

  • patent- or license-related issues (if any) with a rendered documents are eliminated due to an OFL licensed fonts are used everytime and everywhere.

I'm scared about downloaded fonts from the author's website. It can be a fraud!

If you are really scare about it, here is a list with direct links to homepages of fonts used in a foponts project. You can download it separately and use it without any scare :)

NOTE: This case assumes that you take your time and put some efforts into grabbing all fonts in one place and configuring foponts completely manually. Sometimes it requires compiling fonts from theirs sources! How to do this is completely out of scope of the current or any other document within a foponts project.

  1. Galatia SIL: font homepage.
  2. Charis SIL: font homepage.
  3. Liberation source files. NOTE: you have to compile them from source using FontForge.
  4. Free monospaced font download page.

How can I contact the author?

Just drop me a line to eduard.tibet@gmail.com with a "foponts" in subject line. I'm very curious to hear about your usage of foponts.