LG Pitabek fonts

Pitabek Cree and Dene font

Description
Pitabek is based on the original French Catholic missionary font first used in the Fort Albany Cree « Catéchisme, recueil de prières et de cantiques… » in 1854. This first book was published by the « Imprimerie de Louis Perrault », and was typeset by Joseph Guibord (a rather interesting person in Canadian history). By around 1900, this typeface was supplanted by a similar font. The font’s name, « Pitabek » comes from the Cree word for Fort Albany.

This font belongs to the kā-ayisawēyaki style. This style is most notable for its tall n- and l-series, mid-line finals, a round period, and large character widths. The original typeface never contained long vowel dots or western Cree ‘r’ and ‘l’ syllabics. The font designer, Christopher Harvey, added these characters to meet the needs of the modern languages.

Generally speaking, the missionary books of the 1800’s and early 1900’s used a “modern” (didone) Latin font for French or English words to go along with the syllabics. Not an obvious pairing, but the two together certainly give an atmosphere to a document.

Caveats

 * 1) Upstream does not include a detached license file and license information is hidden in font metadata which points to this web page. You should ask upstream to add a detached txt license file in its archives (that can be included in %doc).
 * 2) Upstream nicely versions its fonts, but the archive themselves are not versionned. You should ask upstream to version its archives.
 * 3) Do not forget to add the appropriate fontconfig ruleset to your package.
 * 4) The GPL requires us to ship the sources of material we package so you should ask the author if he uses some other format when editing before converting to TrueType, and if that is so publish fonts in this format so they can be bundled in the src.rpm.
 * 5) There are many good fonts on upstream's web page. If you package this one, consider packaging the others too.