DTL Tech Board Minutes Workgroup conf call Aug 31, 2006 - Fonts Executive Summary =================
The conference call on fonts was reasonable well attended with 12 participants. A new license for fonts, the Open Font License (OFL) was explained. The OFL should speed up font development for Linux by making it easier to mix and match glyphs from one font into the other. An effort has been started to improve the consistency of font configuration between different Linux distributution. Distributions can help along by making their fonts.conf files available on the freedesktop.org wiki. Discussion of cross-desktop/cross-distribution font handling should take place on [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ideas for improvements to the existing generation of font dialogs were made. As a result of the conference call a proposal was made for a text-layout library workshop at the GNOME Boston summit, Oct 7-9. A common text-layout library is important for consistent support of complex languages in open source applications. Attendees ========= Waldo Bastian: Intel corporation, Chairman of OSDL DTL tech board together with Marc Miller. Document fidelity and document exchange between different Linux distributions was brought up in OSDL Desktop Architects meeting as an issue, problem comes down to differences in font handling between distributions. John Cherry: OSDL, Initiative manager OSDL DTL. Marc Miller: AMD, interested in fonts triggered by AMD's acquisition of ATI. Jeff Tranter: Xandros, desktop centric distribution based on KDE, fonts are a big concern Rajesh Banginwar: Intel, Lead LSB Desktop initiative. Would like to expand desktop project to cover font aspects, such as common fonts available on LSB platform. Nicolas Spalinger: SIL International (http://scripts.sil.org/), works on fonts for complex languages, co-written Open Font License with Victor Gaultney of Gentium fame, part of Ubuntu font team. Involved in font-related Bofs at the Libre Graphics meeting, the Ubuntu summit and GUADEC. Goal is to develop community around collaborative font design, develop good set of free quality fonts. The OFL as a common license for open font designers to enable free flow of patches between various font projects. Promoting such font set across the free desktop to increase the number of well-supported writing systems (even complex ones) on the free desktop. Simos Xenitellis: Gnome foundation, involved in localisation for greek language, Ed Trager: bio-informatics at Univ. of Michigan. Maintainer unifont.org. Interested in chinese, thai and indic languages. Daniel Glassey: SIL International, work on graphite technology (http://graphite.sil.org) Behdad Esfahbod: Maintain Pango, work for Redhat, maintain font packages on fedora, gnome developer, interested in arabic support. Keith Packard: Responsible for putting fnts on the screen. Maintain X.org, fontconfig, Cairo. Liam Quin (Joined later): XML Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, www.w3.org). http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ Open Font License ================= "Open Font License" (OFL) is a new license for fonts. Why was the OFL created and how is it different from existing licences such as the GPL? Needed something more readable and font-specific for designers to understand and trust the license better. Needed to fix grey areas like embedding, the status of derivatives, artistic integrity, selling and bundling. GPL and other free software licenses not really designed with fonts in mind. GPL font exception a sign of a problem with embedding but far from an ideal solution. Bitstream Vera/GNOME agreement a good step forward but more needed to be done. OFL is project and organisation neutral: re-usable for other font family and other organisations. Accepted by Debian, included in Ubuntu, included in Fedora. Listed by the FSF as free on their license-list : http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#Fonts The Open Font License webpages: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL with a FAQ : http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web Has OSI looked at OFL? No, hasn't been a priority so far. License requires renaming in order to extend. This may cause problems, e.g. somewhile back SUSE renamed Bitstream Vera to SUSE Sans. Websites/documents specifying SUSE Sans will not work correctly with other Linux distributions. The OFL renaming requirement is designed to allow branching with creating rendering conflicts. The SUSE Sans derivative was not distributed out to other distributions and was brand-specific. The extensions have now been merged back into the main active Vera branch: Dejavu. The problem is more in the way branching and patching is handled. Distributing fonts with the same name and not the same features or coverage is going to break things in a very ugly way. Artistic integrity of the font design is linked to the name of the font family as it appears in the font menu. Designers clearly don't want that to be abused. If they choose to release their work under a license allowing modification they don't want to have their reputation abused by a possibly poorly designed fork/branch claiming their name and confusing users. The SUSE Sans fork probably happened because upstream was not receptive to patches. One goal of the OFL is to make flowing of patches between the various branches and the trunk as easy as possible. It is still the responsibility of the designer to reject a bad patch. The forking/merging back scenarios exists but they are specific to font design. There is an equilibrium that can be found. The OFL has provisions for special agreements where the copyright holder can decide to allow name reuse for derivatives for it's the exception. The fontconfig substitution mechanism comes only after that. Various font families released under OFL listed at: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_fonts and http://unifont.org Font Consistency Across Distributions ===================================== Document fidelity (the same document looking the same on different computers) was identified as a problem on Linux (between different distributions) Several issues: - Distributions including different fonts - Distributions renaming fonts in order to extend (SUSE Sans) - Fontconfig font virtualisation: E.g. "Sans" translates to different fonts on different distributions. Freedesktop.org collection fontconfig.conf files. Goal is to come up with a single fontconfig file that can be used by all distributions. Not sure if it is possible to use single config across all different geos. Such a common fonts.conf will need to be distributed via upstream fontconfig. - Graphite: http://graphite.sil.org The criteria for the core open font set: - freeness (appropriate community-approved licensing: fonts you can use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute, and sell) - glyph quality (not fonts sacrificing quality for coverage) - good coverage of Unicode block for a given family of scripts/language - availability of smart features for complex scripts - Improve font dialog. - Better grouping of fonts. - Provide more information about font license, how to obtain font. Flag up the font metadata (license, foundry, designers, various URLs) to better allow users to learn about fonts and categorize them. A good example of that approach being the proprietary app called font explorerX: http://www.linotype.com/fontexplorerX See also Nicolas' Ubuntu spec at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FontManagement - Distributions: Contribute your fontconfig configuration to freedesktop.org See http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Fonts/fonts.conf - Improve indication whether font is designed for screen-only or is also suitable for print. Something that can be done via good metadata handling as well. Ubuntu specs proposed by Nicolas around fonts: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OpenFonts https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FontManagement https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FontDesignToolkit The GNOME side of things: http://live.gnome.org/fonts Wrap up ======= For a next meeting IRC is considered a more convenient medium. Text Layout Library Workshop ============================ As a result of the conference call a proposal was made for a text-layout library workshop: "With sufficient interest from the relevant stakeholders, might it be possible to get everyone together for a face-to-face workshop / working meeting / conference to discuss the issues, do some initial requirements gathering, and outline a roadmap for development? I don't see this happening without some corporate sponsors willing to provide support for such a gathering." It was suggested to have such meeting during the upcoming GNOME Summit next month (oct 7-9) in Boston: http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006 Followup ======== Discussion of cross-desktop/cross-distribution font handling should take place on [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list xdg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg