[Fwd: the ivory tower and the bazaar]
by Nicolas Mailhot
-------- Message transféré --------
De: Gustavo Ferreira
À: fedora-fonts-list-request
Sujet: the ivory tower and the bazaar
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:38:59 -0300
On Jul 20, 2008, at 2:50 PM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> If the free/open font scene was striving Red Hat needn't have
> shelled a
> lot of money to a closed foundry like Ascender. Or the GNOME
> Foundation
> needn't have done the same with Bitstream for Vera. Experience
> shows it
> is very possible to extend a font with little coverage to more than
> decent one but it requires making a lot of noise around unfinished
> font
> cores with correct licensing to get someone interested. And you don't
> get there via traditionnal ivory tower isolated font designer
> workflow.
i have yet to see one good, original, well-made typeface developed in
the bazaar way. can you name one?
also, please don't be ungrateful to the "isolated ivory-tower
designer workflow", since it has produced the best foss-fonts out there.
i challenge the "free & open font crowd" to promote free/open fonts
on the basis of their typographic quality, without appealing to below-
the-belt demonization of "proprietary designers" and "proprietary
tools".
> Teams was released in 2000 by TopTeam. It took 8 years before someone
> picked it up and started updating it (Edrip). Have Debian (and other
> distributions, sadly Fedora not included) wasted their time by
> publishing Teams for 8 years in its poor state? If they hadn't I
> strongly suspect Edrip would not have happened.
>
> We're seeding our future. Those things take time, a lot of time.
> And the
> future will happen faster if people stop putting their heads in the
> sand, wasting time on proprietary fonts or font tools, and get to
> work.
> During this year's LGM a concerted effort created a new nicely
> licensed
> font from an old fossilizing one in a few days. Just a few years ago
> this would have been complete science fiction.
do you mean NotCourier Sans? i don't dislike the result, but let's be
honest about it -- chopping off serifs from an existing font is not
really type-design...
cheers,
- gustavo.
--
Nicolas Mailhot
15 years, 8 months
[Fwd: Re: the ivory tower and the bazaar]
by Nicolas Mailhot
-------- Message transféré --------
De: Nicolas Mailhot
À: Gustavo Ferreira
Sujet: Re: the ivory tower and the bazaar
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:11:45 +0200
Le dimanche 20 juillet 2008 à 20:38 -0300, Gustavo Ferreira a écrit :
> i have yet to see one good, original, well-made typeface developed in
> the bazaar way. can you name one?
You assume I want original. While original is good it's very low in my
priorities.
Ivory tower design is very good at producing pretty fonts limited to
basic latin that are effectively unuseable in an internationalized
world. Well, I don't care about this kind of pureblood. I'll take a good
unexhalted workhorse over it any day (and that's a generalisation, not
every ivory tower font is so limited but most of them are).
Give me gcc's, not proprietary compilers that look great in benchmarks
but can only do what their original authors cared about.
Pretending fonts can not be produced collectively is pure ubris. Their
art is not more elevated than Renaissance paintings where offloading a
large part of the work to apprentices was common. It's not more elevated
than all the cathedrals that were produced by large teams over several
lifetimes. And local designers are better at designing their glyphs than
someone in an ivory tower the other side of the world anyway.
And yes open collective design is not there yet. But it's progressing
and I've no doubt he'll suprise a lot of people in a few years.
--
Nicolas Mailhot
15 years, 8 months
Fwd: [Fontforge-devel] Cannot import GSUB .fea file
by Vasile Gaburici
The 2nd patch attached here may of interest to anyone that is working
on adding locl tags.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: George Williams <gww(a)silcom.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 6:54 AM
Subject: Re: [Fontforge-devel] Cannot import GSUB .fea file
To: gaburici(a)cs.umd.edu
Cc: fontforge-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net
On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 17:35, Vasile Gaburici wrote:
> I exported a GSUB table to a .fea file and edited it there. But
> importing back doesn't work. When I click on the "Import" right above
> "Save Feature File" nothing happens.
That's not what import is supposed to do.
It should not have been enabled then. Here's a patch to fix it.
> I guess a dialog box should pop up...
Only when it can actually import something. Which it can't here.
> BTW, this is the only reasonable alternative to mindlessly clicking on
> each table when a new language is added (the font is Linux Libertine,
> so it has 20 or so tables).
Ah, good point. Here's another patch to add a language to all selected
lookups with a given script.
15 years, 8 months
I tested Legendum and Garogier
by Vasile Gaburici
Including them in Fedora would be a bad idea. They lack plenty of
accented glyphs. Since the fonts are unmaintained, they aren't likely
to be fixed upstream.
Legendum has two flavors: a "legacy" one, which has some accented
glyphs, but not enough, and a the "non-legacy" which doesn't have any.
The "legacy" version has been generated from the "non-legacy" one by
a tool (otlegacy part of otcomp). To my eyes some of the accents
aren't positioned optimally.
15 years, 8 months
Re: liberation-fonts 1.04 released.
by Caius Carlos CHANCE
Hi Dave,
Thank you very much for your email. I do appreciate your concern on this font set.
IMHO, section 1b requires hardware manufacturer to provide source of these fonts (or modified edition) that they included in their hardware products, as well as to provide the owner of those hardware products to modify and reinstall the reinstalled copy. This is actually an extra protection to consumers when some hardware manufacturers might utilize open sources software (in this case, fonts) but trying to stay away from trouble by stating that any hacking activities on their products will void the warranty. Personally, despite of differences from original text of GPL, this exception is an enhancement instead of regression to human society.
As my personal understanding, Red Hat is the intelligent property owner of Liberation Fonts (Ascender is original manufacturer FYI). It should not be recognized as breakage of GPL clauses because RH is the initial party who release the fonts from commercial to "open source/free" for the public. It is more appropriate to define the license as "a GPL based license with customized modification for better user/developer protections on font-form software" rather than a broken GPL. Yes, personally I would say this is not a GPL, nor a broken GPL, but more like a new license. Hence, it is highly recommended for anyone who is going to utilize Liberation Fonts thoughtfully analysis all contents on both COPYING and License.txt in advance, just like read a brand new license.
Hope this info helps. BTW, Debian package maintainers have approved Liberation Fonts as valid for inclusion in version 1.04.beta2 already.
Wish you enjoyable developing.
Best Regards,
Caius.
----- "Dave Crossland" <dave(a)lab6.com>さんが書いたメッセージ:
> 2008/7/13 Caius Chance <cchance(a)redhat.com>:
> >
> > liberation-fonts version 1.04 has been released:
>
> Section 1b of the license.txt remains; this suggests that the fonts
> are unredistributable under GPL Section 7's "liberty or death" clause
> :-(
>
> Dave
--
Caius Carlos Chance < cchance AT redhat DOT com >
Red Hat APAC | http://apac.redhat.com/disclaimer/
15 years, 8 months
fonts package naming guideline
by Jens-Ulrik Petersen
Nicolas brought up the point recently in a font package review that we
should standardize the naming of our fonts packages to improve
consistency. The proposal is to name all source packages in the form
"*-fonts".
If we agree on this then I think the Fonts Packaging guidelines should
be updated to explicitly reflect this policy.
Here is a list of our source packages that do not currently end in "-fonts":
These old fonts packages should be renamed I guess:
fonts-ISO8859-2 -> ISO8859-2-fonts?
fonts-KOI8-R -> KOI-R-fonts?
This should probably change:
fonts-hebrew-fancy -> fancy-fonts? (from culmus.sf.net)
thaifonts-scalable (upstream name) -> thai-scalable-fonts?
The following are already in the process of disappearing from rawhide:
fonts-arabic - pending removal
fonts-hebrew -recent devel dead.package
fonts-japanese - renamed to japanese-bitmap-fonts today
A few others (*font*):
efont-unicode-bdf -> unicode-bdf-fonts? (maybe better to replace with
GNU Unifont?)
freefont (maybe this too?)
terminus-font -> terminus-fonts?
3, TeX fonts
Probably TeX fonts are outside this discussion?:
(tetex-fonts-hebrew, tex-fonts-hebrew, tetex-eurofont,
tetex-font-cm-lgc, tetex-font-kerkis)
Did I miss any? :)
Jens
15 years, 8 months