Bug 161941

Summary:	Back out the bundling of "Google DocRepair" fonts
Product:	LibreOffice	Reporter:	Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1>
Component:	LibreOffice	Assignee:	Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status:	UNCONFIRMED ---
Severity:	trivial	CC:	aron.budea, caolan.mcnamara, ilmari.lauhakangas, timar74, vsfoote
Priority:	low
Version:	25.2.0.0 alpha0+
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
See Also:	https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159950 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136604
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature:		Regression By:
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	113305

Description Eyal Rozenberg 2024-07-07 19:57:03 UTC

A few days ago, a changeset was submitted to merge some fonts related to something called the "Google DocRepair project":

https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/169765

The fonts for which substitutes were merged are:

Agency FB
Baskerville Old Face
Berlin Sans FB
Cooper Black
Lucida Calligraphy
Lucida Grande
Lucida Handwriting

To my knowledge, all of these fonts are only used rarely by office document authors. Some of them have been prevalent in print in the past (like Baskerville and Cooper Black), others have been used in desktop environment UI (like Lucida Grande). Agency FB was apparently used in the Crysis 2 game...

Anyway, I believe none of these would merit bundling with LibreOffice (and hey won't help with "doc repair") - let alone a set of fonts whose only merit is being metrically equivalent to these.

Let me quote the relevant comment exchange on the Changeset:

> Caolan: https://github.com/docrepair-fonts These are various fonts that google has created to provide metrically equivalent fonts to fonts available in MSOffice to improve document layout for MSOffice compatibility. Similar to "Liberation Serif" for Times New Roman and "Carlito" for Calibri
>
> Ilmari: Sure, but why now? Do we have statistics on how widespread their use is?
>
> Andras Timar: 
> > Sure, but why now?
> Because we discovered these fonts now.
> * Do we have statistics on how widespread their use is?
> I assume Google did the research and decided to develop these fonts

Unfounded assumption :-(

Please undo the Changeset and unbundle these fonts.

Comment 1 V Stuart Foote 2024-07-08 00:23:42 UTC

Yes, I scratched my head about this font addition when I saw it.
Is the "Google DocRepair project" an active effort we need to participate in?

Included fonts seem a bit obscure, especially as we'd clobbered the Adobe OFL Source* font families ([1][2])--presumably in favor of wider i18n support of Noto font offerings.

=-ref-=
[1] https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/143645
[2] https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/143665

Comment 2 Buovjaga 2024-07-08 04:54:24 UTC

I propose to grep through the files in our crash report corpus to find out how many of them contain these fonts.