Around the end of 2006 I come up with the idea of setting up something I called font-machine: a collection of scripts / utilities, intended to improve quality of fonts by defining and implementing automatic tests able to catch errors and provide screenshots. Some pioneering work on this area was done a while ago by Miriam who set up a page showing how fonts currently in Debian look like. I did something similar focusing on the fonts used by the Debian graphical installer (will write a separate post to describe the way it works). I'll start describing the tools which I've used more frequently; of course my preference goes to the ones which can be run non-interactively: those that can be invoked inside shell scrips and keep your CPU busy! fntsample is probably one of the programs I've used more frequently during the last months: it was written by Eugeniy Meshcheryakov, who also made it available as a Debian package, and creates really nice and professional PDF / PS charts showing all the glyphs contained in a particular font file. The following code snippet shows how you can use fntsample to create pdf charts for each of the ttf files contained in ttf-dejavu package (will often refer to this package since I maintain it :-) ):

font="http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/ttf-dejavu/ttf-dejavu-core_2.23-1_all.deb"
deb=$(basename $ font )
wget $font
dpkg -x $ deb  $ deb/.deb/ 

outdir="out"
mkdir $outdir
for ttf in $(find $ deb/.deb/  -name '*.ttf') ; do
pdf="$(basename $ ttf    sed -e "s \.ttf$ \.pdf ")"
fntsample -f $ ttf  -o $ outdir /$ pdf  -l > $ outdir /$ pdf/.pdf/.outline 
pdfoutline $ outdir /$ pdf  $ outdir /$ pdf/.pdf/.outline  $ outdir /$ pdf 
done

Note that PDF files will have useful outlines (aka bookmarks) courtesy of the pdfoutline tool shipped with the fntsample package. Results are IMHO very imperessive! PS: looking at the above chart for Cyrillic, I've just noticed the glyphs are ordered as to read "SEX"... I did not choose that particular chart snippet on purpose!

Mozilla Firefox Locales In 2004, we had for every individual localization a dedicated source package in the Debian archive, such as: mozilla-firefox-locale-ar, mozila-firefox-locale-ca, etc. This is a mess from every point of view. First, it creates much overhead on the archive infrastructure side as well as on the maintainers one, and second, since it often results in localization packages out of sync with the browser, it is a major pain in the ass for the users. Mozilla Firefox Locales All In January 2005, Cesar Martinez Izquierdo introduced the common source package mozilla-firefox-locale-all which included most of the available localizations. That was the inital step to clean up the mess. Later, David Moreno Garza and Luk Claes took the package over and accompanied it through the Mozilla Firefox to Firefox transition. Iceweasel l10n In September 2006, I jumped in as the new maintainer. Since then, the package did continue to evolve:

• rebranding for the Firefox to Iceweasel transition (currently, the foreign locales are fixed, only the en-US locale included in iceweasel is not, patch is at #400721).
• renaming to use the proper l10n naming scheme ($ program -l10n-$ language and not $ program -locale-$ language ).
• with the inclusion of the Catalan and Ukrainian localizations, iceweasel-l10n includes now really all Iceweasel locales which were previously packaged seperately in Debian (Thanks again to Jordi Mallach and Eugeniy Meshcheryakov for their permission for inclusion).

Additionally,

• with the readdition of temporarily removed locales within the Firefox 2.0 release (he for Hebrew and pa-in for Punjabi, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),
• with the inclusion of unofficial but complete localizations (fa-ir for Persian and fur-it for Furlan),
• and the half-official localizations (ka for Georgian and ku for Kurdish, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),

iceweasel-l10n as of 2.0+debian.1-1 supports 43 languages in total. That is more than any other distribution (yes, including Ubuntu :) contains. Icelizard Currently, the locale packages for iceape and icedove are not unified. This September, I was writing to the some of the maintainers but they seemed not interested to fix it for Etch. I will try it again in 2007, my aim is to have proper unified localization packages for all icelizard applications in Lenny. Update: iceweasel-l10n 2.0.0.1+debian-1 adds Valencian localization, so supporting 44 languages now.