Re: I tested Legendum and Garogier

Le dimanche 20 juillet 2008 à 20:13 +0300, Vasile Gaburici a écrit : News at 11, fonts with good Unicode coverage and a correct license are very few. But their license means anyone, not just the author can work on them (ie romanians can fix romanian glyphs for a start). Which means publishing them can incite people to work on them instead of wasting their time with gratis non-modifiable fonts. 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. 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. -- Nicolas Mailhot