On Sun, May 07, 2006 at 02:29:53PM +0200, Egbert Eich wrote: > Till Kamppeter writes: > > - Unique fonts on all distros: A core set of fonts should be absolutely > > identical on all distros. These fonts should be default > > This would require a decent set of open sourced fonts available that > cover the character sets that are required in the locales where linux > matters. > We've discussed this often at X.Org (as we are one source of fonts): > - Few open source tools exist to help with font design.
>From what I've seen, actually there are some open source font tools out there with good guts, but they could use some UI design attention. I'm curious how hard it would be to take one of these tools and put a nicer front end on it. Then this issue could go away. Even without this, the tools are quite usable. We'd talked about possibly incorporating font design features into inkscape, but after reviewing the existing tools, felt that they were good enough as is. > - Good font desgin is a hard job requiring a lot of experience. > (Probably not a job for a group of people from the community to > pick up) Sure, but there's many hard tasks requiring experience that the open source community actually has excelled at. Many of these kinds of tasks don't really need a group of people, but rather one or two people with an obsessive passion in the subject, the right tools, and an audience to encourage them. > - There is almost no way around taking some money and 'by' fonts > to put them under a suitable license. I don't know; that could certainly work, but I wouldn't say it's the only way. I think with a good community support, we could "grow" expert font designers, just as we've grown excellent iconographers, translators, usability experts, and so on. My experience so far working with font designers (e.g. Benji Park http://ocal.bensuz.com/) has been positive, and with our encouragement and help increasing the visibility of their efforts, we could solve this issue much more fully. http://www.openfontlibrary.org/ Bryce
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