Forcing separation of fonts & themes - why?

[jouhou]

My theme uses 08-Atadore.fnt, which doesn't come with the default .rockbox installation, so I was planning to include it in the .zip file that I upload to themes.rockbox.org.

Your upload system rejects my .zip file because "08-Atadore.fnt is included in the font pack download. Don't include it in your theme".


It is silly to scatter files, necessary for a theme to work properly, across this website.  All files required for a theme to function properly should be included in the theme's .zip download.
Users should not be forced to (1) find the font pack link on this site, (2) download an entire font pack, (3) hunt & peck inside that font pack for the font required by the theme they want to try, (4) then copy it to their rockbox installation.


Why does the system force users to download themes and a theme's font in 2 different places?  It's not end-user friendly at all.


I bet most users won't even be aware they have to download a "font pack" to get a theme to work properly, and the theme they wanted to try will be unnecessarily maligned.

[bluebrother]

It is silly to scatter files, necessary for a theme to work properly, across this website.  All files required for a theme to function properly should be included in the theme's .zip download.

Yes and no. This is definitely debateable, but having a common set of files (in this case: fonts) the user is expected to install makes sense. The fonts have been separated into the fonts pack because they change rarely. Is it that better to force users to re-download fonts again and again? Just think of big fonts like unifont.

Users should not be forced to (1) find the font pack link on this site, (2) download an entire font pack, (3) hunt & peck inside that font pack for the font required by the theme they want to try, (4) then copy it to their rockbox installation.

Users shouldn't do that anyway. Users should use Rockbox Utility, which is the recommended installation method. Rockbox Utility does handle all this for the user, and the "Complete Installation" which I'm rather sure most users will use, does that. Plus a few other things. There's also no hurt in installing the complete font pack, so there is really no need to "peck inside that font pack".

Why does the system force users to download themes and a theme's font in 2 different places?  It's not end-user friendly at all.

Because of download sizes. Because to minimize duplication.

There's also another issue (that is currently not handled for any theme using other fonts): if two themes use the same font and each theme ships the fonts they will overwrite each other. That is, the font included in the theme installed last will be present. However, who guarantees that those two (identical) fonts are identical at all? I can imagine two problems here: (1) The two fonts being completely different and only using the same filename. This will at least break one of the themes completely. (2) The two fonts being identical but different versions, i.e. changes have been made to the font. The change that's most likely (IMO) is that the number of supported glyphs differes. This could lead to the situation that Theme A can display your non-ASCII tags properly but only if you installed it after Theme B. If you installed Theme B after Theme A then Theme A would behave differently (as in: show less non-ASCII characters). If such a character is even used by the theme (like localized strings) this could even end up in the theme (in my example A) showing nonsense (while in my example Theme B might not use those characters, probably because using non-localized strings so showing up correctly).

While I consider this a general issue it can get minimized for the common fonts by moving them out of the theme.

I bet most users won't even be aware they have to download a "font pack" to get a theme to work properly, and the theme they wanted to try will be unnecessarily maligned.

No, because most users will get that done automagically. If they notice about the font pack it's ok, if they don't notice the fonts being in a separate package it's no big deal either.

[jouhou]

I see now the reasoning behind it, thank you.

Unfortunately, my theme was for the Sansa Clip+ which is not fully supported by Rockbox Utility.  I just tried using Rockbox Utility on it, and it is incompatible with the newest official Clip+ firmware (which it needs in order to do its automated magic).

[bluebrother]

Unfortunately, my theme was for the Sansa Clip+ which is not fully supported by Rockbox Utility.  I just tried using Rockbox Utility on it, and it is incompatible with the newest official Clip+ firmware (which it needs in order to do its automated magic).

I don't know what the newest Clip+ firmware is, but you could try the svn builds of Rockbox Utility (see my signature). Once a new firmware file is known to work it's usually added, and as far as I can see a new one has been added since the last release.

[audio-i]

Why does the system force users to download themes and a theme's font in 2 different places?  It's not end-user friendly at all.

Because of download sizes. Because to minimize duplication.

I can't recall exactly in which themes I've seen it, but some authors have opted to rename fonts already included in the font pack, so that the theme zip including the renamed font, is accepted by the theme site... in that way you can end up with as many duplications as themes by these authors you download. So hopefully with discussions like the one in this thread they will end that practice.

[saratoga]

Unfortunately, my theme was for the Sansa Clip+ which is not fully supported by Rockbox Utility.  I just tried using Rockbox Utility on it, and it is incompatible with the newest official Clip+ firmware (which it needs in order to do its automated magic).

rockbox utility uses the same code as mkamsboot for patching firmwares, so it'll definitely work with anything mkasmboot does.  Probably whats happening here is that you've got a newer build of mkamsboot then you do rbutil, so you don't have updated sandisk md5 sums for the newer firmware.  Grab an svn build of rbutil and I *think* everything should work (unless theres some problem with the clip+ in rbutil that i'm not aware of).