The image CAPTCHA provides a rather crappy default font, which is some built-in PHP bitmap font. Admin has to upload an ttf him/herself to make the image CAPTCHA acceptable. The reason to not include some ttf fonts with the image CAPTCHA package are licensing issues.

But now there is the recently launched http://fontstruct.fontshop.com where you can easily create ttf fonts.
That site contains now a lot of fonts, made by its users, which are licensed under a creative commons license.
So we could now reconsider to provide some default font(s) with the image CAPTCHA package

CommentFileSizeAuthor
#10 tesox-sample.png31.95 KBsoxofaan

Comments

soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented

from http://drupal.org/node/312970#comment-1028572:

There are a lot of people making free fonts under various licences. The Bitstream Vera true type font, http://www.gnome.org/fonts/, has a BSD style licence allowing both inclusion and redistribution. You could include the font by renaming the text files to Vera.*, for example readme.txt to Vera.readme.txt, or you could include the whole Vera directory as a subdirectory and include fonts from subdirectories.

cwatt’s picture

cwatt commented

Or an alternative might be to use the Liberation fonts available from https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/ which includes open source alternatives for popular fonts.

soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented

I' would really like to provide a better default font, but I'm still not sure if it's compatible with Drupal code hosting policies

some pointers:
http://drupal.org/node/124978
http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2006-May/016589.html
http://drupal.org/node/66113

soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented

I was searching for public domain fonts and just found Tuffy, which can be used totally unrestricted:

I grant any entity the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

I think I'm going to include this one (probably the regular and bold weight versions): it's a pretty normal font, nothing fancy, recognizable characters, it covers [a-zA-Z0-9], there is clear difference between upper and lower case

soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented

I just tried to add Tuffy, but the drupal cvs server complained about the included LICENCE.txt file:

** Access denied: this file is not allowed:
** contributions/modules/captcha/image_captcha/fonts/Tuffy/LICENSE.txt
** The only files allowed in contributions/profiles are .txt and .profile
** Packaged files (.gz, .tar, .tgz, and .zip) are not allowed anywhere.
** License files (LICENSE.txt) are not allowed, since everything committed
** to the Drupal CVS repository must be licensed under the GPL.
** You should never commit .svn/* or .bzr/* files to the CVS repository.

I'm not a license expert, but I guess relicensing public domain work as GPL is also not permitted.

rodenp’s picture

rodenp commented
soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented
Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

I've started the thread #497822: Drupal.org CVS policy regarding fonts in the drupal.org infrastructure issue queue.
Hopefully some license expert picks it up and can figure out what's possible

soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented

I also started to play with the FontStruct tool to create a font myself, so I can license it the way I want:
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/fontstructions/show/dropacha
The font is rather grunge, free hand, low quality, and everything but professional of course,
but in way that is ok for an Image CAPTCHA ;)

soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented

here is another possible solution to create a font ourselves: http://www.fontcapture.com/

soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented
StatusFileSize
new tesox-sample.png31.95 KB

I played a bit with http://www.fontcapture.com/ and came up with this font
much better than the crap in #8

soxofaan’s picture

soxofaan commented
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Fixed

Yay,
I finally pushed the button and now image captcha includes a TrueType (Tesox) font by default:
http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=264260

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.