Re: LibreOffice Fonts

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello Tom,

Tom Balzer <tbalzer@ksu.edu> skribis:

> Recently I installed libreoffice in my user profile, and found that all
> menus require the package 'font-gnu-freetype-ttf' in order to render
> correctly. Without this package, every character was rendered as a
> rectangle indicating a missing font.

Every character in the body of the text, or every character in the UI?

> From the manuals description of 'propagated-inputs', it seems like
> this font package would fit the use case:
>
>> Lastly, ‘propagated-inputs’ is similar to ‘inputs’, but the
>> specified packages will be automatically installed alongside
>> the package they belong to (*note ‘guix package’:
>> package-cmd-propagated-inputs, for information on how ‘guix
>> package’ deals with propagated inputs.)
>> 
>> For example this is necessary when a C/C++ library needs
>> headers of another library to compile, or when a pkg-config
>> file refers to another one via its ‘Requires’ field.
>
> I asked on #guix, and one argument against including fonts in propagated
> inputs is to avoid packaging the font when 'pack'ing for another
> system. This to me is really an argument for including the fonts, since
> there is no guarantee that the other system is 'rational', so to
> speak. To create totally portable packages I would think including this
> font required to render the menus would make sense.

I think it’s a borderline case.  In a sense, the font is additional
material used as input by LO (and indeed LO is much less useful without
it, but it’s still LO), though I can also understand the other argument.

My current inclination would be the status quo.  Otherwise we’d have to
worry about fonts and artwork for Abiword, Inkscape, etc. as well.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.