* ANNOUNCING FONTAINE * Hi, everyone,
Fontaine is a command-line utility that displays key meta information about font files, including but not limited to font name, style, weight, glyph count, character count, copyright, license information and orthographic coverage. The software is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v. 2 or any later version. I am writing this software initially for use with the Open Font Library project (OFLB). The OFLB project is still "in the works" and as a result it is accurate to say that Fontaine is also still "in the works". Nevertheless, I believe that Fontaine will have application outside of the OFLB project. In order to meet various possible application needs, Fontaine has the ability to produce reports in JSON, XML, XHTML, and TEXT formats. I have created a web page documenting Fontaine on Unifont.org: http://www.unifont.org/fontaine/ I have also created a Sourceforge.net project for Fontaine: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fontaine/ ... and the source code is available for checkout from SVN: svn co https://fontaine.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fontaine I plan to create an interactive web page which will demonstrate how Fontaine works. However I haven't got quite that far yet. The software uses a CMAKE-based build system and is known to work on Linux and OSX. It has not yet been extensively tested on other platforms. Some features which will be needed for the OFLB site are still missing and implementing those features will take priority. Help on completing, vetting, and expanding the orthography data files will be especially welcome. An initial list of known bugs is shown on the unifont.org/fontaine web page. Suggestions for further improvement and patches for bug fixes are welcome. Note that in many cases Fontaine reports on entire "orthography groups" (such as "Western European", "Central European", "Pan African Latin", etc.) rather than on individual languages the way that software like FontConfig does. The orthography work I have done for Fontaine has required striking a careful balance between opposing forces -- simplicity and generality versus specificity. At the extremes, there are "pervasively adopted" scripts (like Latin) and "singularly adopted" scripts (like Japanese). Those opposing forces operate differently on different scripts, especially at the extremes of the continuum. Fontaine thus uses its own set of orthography files in order to provide reports in ways that are, to the best of my abilities, most meaningful in the context of fonts. Fontaine is new, so certainly the jury is still out regarding whether I have made the right decisions here, but I thought this especially worth mentioning given the recent and very laudable work on orthography files in FontConfig. Best Wishes -- Ed Trager