Around 6 o'clock on Dec 19, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> While I understand the commercial need to keep quiet, I trust that > enough noises have been made in the right directions to ensure that > skilled people like Keith Packard haven't been wasting their time. I learned of this interesting effort immediately before the announcement. I'm actually glad I wasn't asked to sign an NDA to receive earlier access to the information, as I would have been reluctant to do so. I prefer to work in the open without constraint on what I may publish, especially when developing standards that affect interoperability among new and existing softwares. Much of this new code will be of interest to anyone doing text layout. I'm confident that Sun's engineering has generated a useful abstraction for Unicode text layout using information available in modern font formats. As I'm not convinced that such interfaces are ready for standardization, another implementation should only serve to enhance all of our understandings on how such a system can work. This is a great contribution to the corpus. Parts relating to interoperation with existing software are more problematic. As many of you are aware, I've been attempting to generate concensus around font configuration and customization, and I'm a bit concerned that this will introduce yet another mechanism to incorporate into our thinking. I'm hoping to work with the ST developers to avoid this and ensure that we can converge on some eventual common mechanism. As the code (and documentation) will eventually be published with a BSD license, I would expect any such discussions could occur on public mailing lists with participation from the entire community. I will strive to ensure that any such process result in the best technical solution, not only for XFree86, but also for other interested parties. I wait, along with the rest of the XFree86 community, for the publication of the documentation and software so that we can all take a good look at what I believe will be a valuable contribution to the open source software environment. Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
