[TOOLS-DEVELOPMENT] Report: RFI - Fonts for PDF RFCs

["Heather Flanagan (RFC Series Editor)" <[e-mail]>]

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Hello all,

The comment period for the font RFI has closed, and while we did not get
many responses, the input received was mostly useful.  In particular, we
now have more information on what fonts are available via an open source
license from Adobe [1], additional pointers to consider Noto [2] as well
as Roboto [3], Open Sans [4], and Skolar [5], and that the requirement
for a monospace font with broad Unicode support is going to be a problem.

One suggestion received included a suggestion that we find a
professional document designer to help with the layout and typefaces.  I
have no information on how much that would cost, so I have sent out some
very unofficial queries to see if I can get an idea of whether this is
remotely within our means.  It may be that we can combine this with a
CSS developer for the HTML format, though I have no more information to
provide at this moment on whether that's a viable idea or not.  I'll
keep pursuing that idea, but separately from the font issue (for now -
these may merge back together in the future).

Back to the question of fonts, however, based on the input received, I
think the Noto font family will be the best option.  It gives us a wide
range of Unicode support and was designed to work together across the
different scripts.  The only gap here is the lack of a monospace font
within this family.  The other fonts mentioned--the Adobe fonts, Roboto,
and Open Sans--are all more significantly limited in their scripts than
Noto is.  Adobe has a monospace font option (Source Code Pro) but it is
limited to Latin 4 (aka Western European) script support.

There are several possible next steps, in estimated order of cost
(lowest to highest):

1. Change the new format requirements to limit all code examples, ASCII
artwork, or anything else that requires a fixed-width font to only use
ASCII characters or Latin 4 characters and use Adobe's  Source Code Pro.
2. Find someone at Google to see what it would take to get monospace
variants for Noto that covers as many font families as possible.
3. Pay for the development of monospace typeface that would include at
least the most expected use cases for non-Latin characters in RFCs
(Asian scripts) as well as the Latin 3 and 4 (Eastern and Western
European) scripts.

I'd rather not do option 3 if we can avoid it.  I don't think the
(probable) expense is worth the effort if other options are available. 
Option 1 is something we can fall back on if all else fails (for now)
but this doesn't have to be a permanent choice.  It can be what we do
for now, and we can change this when fonts become available.  I think
that's the right place to start.  And while we have that as our default,
we can talk to the fine folks at Google (does anyone have a good contact
within the Noto project?) about a set of monospace variants.

Discussion and other opinions are welcome.  Please let me know if you
have any questions!

- -Heather


[1] https://github.com/adobe-fonts/
[2] http://www.google.com/get/noto , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts
[3] http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto ,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roboto
[4] http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans
[5] https://www.rosettatype.com/Skolar
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