Re: Fedora 7 CD Labels & Covers

2007-05-26 Thread Martin Sourada

Máirí­n Duffy wrote:
(As an aside, how is URW U001 [1] in terms of glyph coverage? Is that 
another option?)


Hmm... I think I missed the footnote? Which one is URW U001? All URW fonts I 
tried never extended much beyond Latin characters, central European extensions 
to it (e.g. ščř) and punctuation... Nearly no Greek glyphs available. It's a 
pity since URW fonts are one of the best looking fonts I ever used (in 
documents, not on screen). DejaVu has quite good coverage, though for using 
Japanese I still need a separate font, but I guess, we will see some time in the 
future nearly-full Unicode coverage in DejaVu. About Liberation Fonts... hmm... 
I tried serif, but didn't like it much... for me it has too thin characters (the 
whole characters, not strokes)...


Martin

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Re: Fedora 7 CD Labels & Covers

2007-05-26 Thread Nicolas Mailhot
Le vendredi 25 mai 2007 à 19:08 -0400, Máirí­n Duffy a écrit :
> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le vendredi 25 mai 2007 à 13:38 -0400, Matthias Clasen a écrit :
> >> On Fri, 2007-05-25 at 17:09 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> >>> FYI the liberation fonts are nice and it's certainly worth showcasing
> >>> them but they're not Fedora 7 default fonts, since they lack extended
> >>> glyph coverage and lack hinting.
> >> Yes, so what ?
> > 
> > So using them systematically is not reflecting the project state
> > accurately, and it will hurt the local Fedora groups when they try to
> > localise Fedora marketing material and discover their language is just
> > not supported.
> 
> I hope it will help to give the reasons why I chose it. I will most 
> certainly switch it to DejaVu Sans, which will have better i18n support, 
> right? I honestly didn't realize Liberation Sans had a coverage problem; 
> I didn't try any non-basic English glyphs with it so that's my bad.

Liberation Sans has not a coverage "problem", it already includes greek
and cyrillic glyphs (which is more than Bitstream Vera when it was
released, or most latin-only fonts you can buy). It's just that it does
not really compare to some of our other fonts, and even its coverage of
latin, greek ans cyrillic is not complete (so big languages will work,
minority/local languages won't).

A very crude way to assess a font is to upload it on
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/custom.htm read the glyph
count and look at the glyph matrix. A much better indicator would be the
language support coverage matrix DejaVu publishes with every release but
its generator needs fontconfig sources and fonts in sfd format (IIRC) so
it's not useful for the average artists. We really need a tester tool
that would do the same on any on-disk ttf/otf font.

Anyway, some result for F7 common FLOSS fonts:
- DejaVu Sans/Serif: 4538/1939
- DejaVU LGC Sans/Serif: 3532/1881
- Linux Libertine: 2274
- Gentium: 1699
- Liberation Sans/Serif: 668/661
- Vera Sans/Serif: 268

And another we should really get into Fedora, but has a build system
from hell (and what's the point of FLOSS if you can't work from sources)
and is in opentype OTF format all out tools can not handle yet: Computer
Modern Unicode
( http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/%7Epanov/cm-unicode/ )

> (As an aside, how is URW U001 [1] in terms of glyph coverage? Is that 
> another option?)

IIRC URW U001 is free-to-use but not especially FLOSS, limited to latin
(and even basic latin), and in legacy type one format people are moving
away from.

[…]

> I could have used DejaVu Sans, but to be honest I'm really sick of Deja 
> Vu's look since it's one of the only good free & open fonts out there 
> and I've seriously used it to death! :)

You have to compromise.
Entities with an international reach (like Fedora) almost never use the
very distinctive fonts you way be used to as a designer, for the
following reasons:
- it's very hard and costly to create international fonts
- it's even harder to decline an original font
- any substitution for coverage reasons is going to stand out. And
projecting a common worldwide style is more valuable than being cool in
a few countries
- very distinctive fonts are distinctive because they're different from
the ones people are used to read, ie harder to read.
- Title fonts in particular are useless for plain text, which is another
reason people don't bother extending their coverage
- very distinctive fonts often do not age gracefully (trends change, a
style may be great one year and laughable 5 years later)
- periodic re-styling is no option, it's overly costly and hurts the
common unified persona you want to project

It's probably OK to use Liberation for titles. The benefits of
showcasing it may outweight the fact it won't be a choice for many
languages. Using it for text where the glyphs are too small for most
people to see the difference OTOH is stupid IMHO.

Also only using Liberation fonts (as I've seen proposed, including in
the message I reacted to) is sending a message I don't agree with (as
already explained)

> How are non-technical Fedora groups making Liberation a Fedora emblem? 

The original RH PR release wrote about FLOSS fonts intended to replace
[a lot of things] (when it will be finished), and many people have taken
it as "Fedora intent is to use Liberation in all its documents *now*
because it's the only realistic FLOSS font"

> But Bitstream is a professional foundry that has closed fonts as well, 
> no?

Current default is DejaVu LGC which is not produced by Bitstream but by
a FLOSS project. Also there's no possible comparison between the
handling by GNOME of the Bitstream fonts and the handling by Red Hat of
Liberation. 

> Or did Bitstream do the work and then license it openly? 
> (It's a real question, I actually honestly don't know; I was pretty
> sure the latter was the case though.)

Bitstream did most of the work but the final stage saw a dialog between

Re: Fedora 7 CD Labels & Covers

2007-05-26 Thread Nicolas Mailhot
Le samedi 26 mai 2007 à 11:07 +0200, Martin Sourada a écrit :
> DejaVu has quite good coverage, though for using 
> Japanese I still need a separate font, but I guess, we will see some time in 
> the 
> future nearly-full Unicode coverage in DejaVu.

nearly-full Unicode coverage is a lot of work, so some time in the
future may be a long time in the future (the project is progressing
along nicely but I don't see scripts with a big number of glyphs like
Japanese happen soon as the current designers are already busy
elsewhere)

If you know interested people (that know font design or are willing to
learn) they always need new hands. The required tools are included in
Fedora.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot


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Fedora 7 Labels for Distribution Project

2007-05-26 Thread Thomas Chung

Sorry folks, I haven't been following fedora-art-list recently but
could someone upload the latest Fedora 7 Labels for Distribution
Project[1] to CDArt page[2]?
I understand there is a generic one in dfong people page[3] but we
need complete set.
What I mean by that is,

1) Fedora 7 DVD (i386)
2) Fedora 7 DVD (x86_64)
3) Fedora 7 DVD (ppc)
4) Fedora 7 LiveCD GNOME (i386)
5) Fedora 7 LiveCD KDE (i386)

Make sure to use copyright year "2007" in legal statement.

Copyright (c) 2007 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved.
"Fedora" and the Fedora logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc.
This software is provided "as-is" and without any warranty, either
express or implied.

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Project
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/CDArt
[3] http://people.redhat.com/dfong/fc7graphics/

Regards
--
Thomas Chung
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ThomasChung

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Re: Fedora 7 CD Labels & Covers

2007-05-26 Thread Máirí­n Duffy

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
[... snip ...]


A very crude way to assess a font is to upload it on
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/custom.htm read the glyph
count and look at the glyph matrix. A much better indicator would be the
language support coverage matrix DejaVu publishes with every release but
its generator needs fontconfig sources and fonts in sfd format (IIRC) so
it's not useful for the average artists. We really need a tester tool
that would do the same on any on-disk ttf/otf font.


Sweet, this is all very useful info, thank you!


Anyway, some result for F7 common FLOSS fonts:
- DejaVu Sans/Serif: 4538/1939
- DejaVU LGC Sans/Serif: 3532/1881
- Linux Libertine: 2274
- Gentium: 1699
- Liberation Sans/Serif: 668/661
- Vera Sans/Serif: 268


Cool I haven't heard of a couple of those actually (Libertine and 
Gentium) so I will check them out.


Are the Luxi and Nimbus fonts FLOSS at all?


And another we should really get into Fedora, but has a build system
from hell (and what's the point of FLOSS if you can't work from sources)
and is in opentype OTF format all out tools can not handle yet: Computer
Modern Unicode
( http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/%7Epanov/cm-unicode/ )

(As an aside, how is URW U001 [1] in terms of glyph coverage? Is that 
another option?)


IIRC URW U001 is free-to-use but not especially FLOSS, limited to latin
(and even basic latin), and in legacy type one format people are moving
away from.

[…]

I could have used DejaVu Sans, but to be honest I'm really sick of Deja 
Vu's look since it's one of the only good free & open fonts out there 
and I've seriously used it to death! :)


You have to compromise.
Entities with an international reach (like Fedora) almost never use the
very distinctive fonts you way be used to as a designer, for the
following reasons:
- it's very hard and costly to create international fonts
- it's even harder to decline an original font
- any substitution for coverage reasons is going to stand out. And
projecting a common worldwide style is more valuable than being cool in
a few countries
- very distinctive fonts are distinctive because they're different from
the ones people are used to read, ie harder to read.


FWIW, by stylish/distinctive I don't mean you know, something tacky like 
Comic Sans or Papyrus or Vivaldi, I mean more readable fonts like Gill 
Sans or Myriad.



- Title fonts in particular are useless for plain text, which is another
reason people don't bother extending their coverage
- very distinctive fonts often do not age gracefully (trends change, a
style may be great one year and laughable 5 years later)
- periodic re-styling is no option, it's overly costly and hurts the
common unified persona you want to project'

It's probably OK to use Liberation for titles. The benefits of
showcasing it may outweight the fact it won't be a choice for many
languages. Using it for text where the glyphs are too small for most
people to see the difference OTOH is stupid IMHO.


I was proposing to use it for titles - eg the name of the CD/DVD.


Also only using Liberation fonts (as I've seen proposed, including in
the message I reacted to) is sending a message I don't agree with (as
already explained)


I never proposed this, sorry, and I just re-read my mail to make sure it 
couldn't have been misconstrued that way either. I said *all* the fonts 
I used in my very first draft were Liberation, yes (because of sheer 
laziness on my part actually.) I never proposed that we *only* use 
Liberation Sans, though, (and I was especially not proposing using only 
Liberation Sans beyond the scope of this CD/DVD label design). Seriously.


How are non-technical Fedora groups making Liberation a Fedora emblem? 


The original RH PR release wrote about FLOSS fonts intended to replace
[a lot of things] (when it will be finished), and many people have taken
it as "Fedora intent is to use Liberation in all its documents *now*
because it's the only realistic FLOSS font"


I just re-read the Red Hat press release and I think that's a bit of a 
leap you've made there. If you can point to some specific quote... but 
I'm not seeing any in this. Maybe the word "substitution" in order to 
explain the differences between and provide examples each of serif, sans 
serif, and monotype fonts was a poor choice? But I only saw that as 
explaining the types of fonts they were (especially in the absence of a 
sorely-needed type sample on that page!)


But Bitstream is a professional foundry that has closed fonts as well, 
no?


Current default is DejaVu LGC which is not produced by Bitstream but by
a FLOSS project. 


DejaVu is a fork of Bitstream, is it not? Or I have completely 
misunderstood?



Also there's no possible comparison between the
handling by GNOME of the Bitstream fonts and the handling by Red Hat of
Liberation. 


Why?


Or did Bitstream do the work and then license it openly? 
(It's a real question, I actually honestly don't know; I was pretty

sure the latter was