Some fonts don't comply with the GPL

[Hiradur]

Some fonts are not entirely free (e.g. free for non-commercial use only) and thus don't comply with the GPL. Namely:

bluebold.ttf
bluecond.ttf
bluehigh.ttf
Cyberbit.tff
digital-7.mono.ttf
micross.ttf

Some of these fonts may not be used at all by RoR, this has to be investigated. However, the Cyberbit font seems to play a major role for localization.

Among licensing issues this also means that RoR can't be packaged for the Debian "main" software repository in its current state since these fonts break with the Debian Free Software Guidelines ( http://www.debian.org/social_contract ).

[Hiradur]

From a quick fulltext search I think it'd be safe to remove these fonts as I don't think they are used anywhere:

bluebold.ttf
bluecond.ttf
bluehigh.ttf
micross.ttf

digital-7.mono.ttf appears to be used by dashboards and Cyberbit.tff is used in many places so we need replacement fonts with free/libre licenses for these. We already have VeraMono so that may be a candidate. Needs investigation. Replacing Cyberbit.ttf won't be so easy since it's used for localization and as such we need a font with a large character set.

[Hiradur]

Note: After replacing Cyberbit.tff it's important to check if and how code ranges (http://www.rigsofrods.com/wiki/pages/Language_Translation#How_it_works) for localization are affected (compare glyphs with a font editor such as FontForge).

[ohlidalp]

@Hiradur Thanks for looking into this.

"BlueHighway" sounds familiar. Either it used to be part of Ogre sample media, or it used to be part of CEGUI. I remember seeing the name in Ogre logs when doing tutorials. Anyway, we're not the only ones having this concern: http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?p=59035&sid=caf6519b31a7ae55ebad8e7245dc90aa#p59035

[Hiradur]

@only-a-ptr Yes, they were used for OGRE samples and have since been removed from OGRE due to licensing issues: https://ogre3d.atlassian.net/browse/OGRE-76

[Hiradur]

The Vera fonts can't replace Cyberbit because they contain only latin characters. The DeJaVu fonts are often proposed but don't contain the chinese characters for example (http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/samples/DejaVuSans.pdf )

The biggest free font is GNU Unifont: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

it's ~12mb big which matches the file size of Cyberbit.tff. A character set this large may seem like overkill but it's definetely the most future-proof which is important considering the code range hassle mentioned above.

Still looking for a replacement for digital-7.mono.ttf

[Hiradur]

I removed these 4 fonts:

bluebold.ttf
bluecond.ttf
bluehigh.ttf
micross.ttf

and discovered that bluebold.ttf is used for the gear indicator...

So we need replacements for:

bluebold.ttf (used for gear indicator)
Cyberbit.tff
digital-7.mono.ttf

[AnotherFoxGuy]

Replacement for digital-7.mono.ttf? https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/lcd-font

[Hiradur]

Replacement for digital-7.mono.ttf? https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/lcd-font

Looks like 7-segment characters are not finished (see TO DO list) so it's not a perfect replacement. Otherwise I'd say yes, there don't seem to be many free/libre digital fonts.