Re: [OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] OFL-FAQ update draft and web fonts paper
Dave Crossland d...@lab6.com skribis: On 22 May 2013 22:41, Vernon Adams v...@newtypography.co.uk wrote: Any chance you can give an 'idiots guide' on how a trademark license would preserved some of the effects of the RFN? I'm unsure how and when this trademark license would work? What would it be aimed at preventing? If you have no RFN, someone can make subsets (yay) but also release Oswald Serif without additional permission (hmm) - but if you have a trademark, they can subset Oswald but can't release Oswald Serif. Please consider http://svn-qavm.apache.org/repos/svn-org/trunk/legal/trademark-policy.html I have long thought and continue to think that RFNs are way more trouble than they are worth. It makes the OFL look complicated and frightening, which is the opposite of what should be the goal. Plus, if someone intends to give a font a different name, they don’t need to be told to do it; and, if they do not intend to, they are not going to corrupt society to the core. The worst that will happen is you’ll have to be careful where you got the font. The rest of the software community has managed to get along for decades without having everyone give their version of ‘ls’ a different name. It creates problems, big ones, but the alternative is worse. Trademark is a related but different issue.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Re: [ft-devel] new CFF engine
On 1 May 2013, at 16:44, Claus Eggers Sørensen clau...@gmail.com wrote: Great, but why was this work done? vernon adams v...@newtypography.co.uk skribis: So (their) fonts would look better rendered on screens? I would assume they did it to advance the state of the art and support human progress. For years I’ve been wanting them to do this for exactly that reason. Also Google asked Adobe nicely (I assume), because Google wanted to advance the state of the art, support human progress, and make money doing so. It is not good to withhold knowledge of how to render fonts well, when that’s not even a source of income due to the withholding, and when obviously most of the rest of the industry hasn’t the vaguest clue how to render a font, and causes extensive damage by trying (unsuccessfully) to foist that job onto font designers. Unsurprisingly this also makes good business sense. Perhaps full openness a lot sooner could have prevented the existence of TrueType in the first place.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] font assimilation
Jon Phillips j...@fabricatorz.com quotes this exchange: On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 4:53 PM, vern adams v...@newtypography.co.uk wrote: On 28 Mar 2012, at 09:41, Robert Martinez wrote: It appears that google has no other business than to hoarde OFL licenced fonts. That's a funny way to word it :) i think you'll find the google webfont directory is simply a library of mostly OFL licensed fonts, made accessible via google's very smart font API. The fonts themselves are freely available apart from the google API, e.g via fontsquirrel.com Google does not simply hoard existing fonts, but provides versions tailored to use on the web, in Google’s OSes and applications, etc. This is definitely the case with my own fonts, where I have provided them with TrueType versions not available elsewhere, and where they have made improvements for Google Reader that I have not (to date) backported.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] [Blueprint font-face-generator] The library must automatically generate @font-face files for uploaded fonts
Schrijver e...@authoritism.net skribis: TTF’s also don’t support OpenType features, which are going to be supported by Firefox. Does anyone know how this is for WOFF? TTF does support OT features (it's just that earlier versions of the format exist that don't support OT, and so there is a lot of software support for TrueType without OT features).
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] hinting workflow
Schrijver e...@authoritism.net skribis: He mentioned that hinting actually is the bottleneck for new fonts for the screen, whether open source or commercial: it costs a huge amount of time, and the required knowledge and skill are rare. The problem probably would go away if we put as much effort into making renderers more clever as people are putting into instructing fonts, or indeed if Adobe simply released CoolType or whatever they are calling their renderer as free software. Decently designed and hinted PostScript fonts work very nicely in Adobe Reader, to my eyes better than all but a few TrueType fonts do in a browser. It's disheartening to me that the transition to web fonts doesn't go along with a transition of screen fonts from TrueType to CFF.
[OpenFontLibrary] FONTLOG
Is OFLB supposed to reject a fontlog just because it doesn't have an extension? Because that's what it seems to have done with my Sorts Mill Goudy. Also the list of valid file types does not include Adobe feature files, not to mention other possible necessities for full openness, such as Python code, shell scripts, Autotools files, etc. That's the kind of stuff I've been transitioning towards. I'm guessing, though, that one could make dist-zip and then stick the resulting zip source package within the zip OFLB package.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Revival of the fittest
Barry Schwartz chemoelect...@chemoelectric.org skribis: Alexandre Prokoudine alexandre.prokoud...@gmail.com skribis: Speaking of preferences, there seems to be a demand for an open source Jenson. Hands off! That's what I've been working on. :) D'oh! It's 3:30 in the morning, obviously. I have been working on a Janson, not a Jenson. :)
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Revival of the fittest
Nathan Willis nwil...@glyphography.com skribis: Ronaldson I wouldn't do that one, because Canada Type came out with theirs just a couple of years ago and they are very nice. IMO we could use a good Caslon. I'm working on a Kis/Janson, which is similar, but often do not finish my work, and Caslon is more familiar. I suspect that the Dutch baroque style of these fonts is one of the better genres for a text font on an LCD display.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] hinting workflow
Ben Laenen benlae...@gmail.com skribis: Eric Schrijver wrote: I do think all this shows hinting is still a bit of a black art. Am I correct in thinking that most projects could at first get by using the automated hinting of the design programs? Or is that typographic blasphemy :) Well, you can get some results out of the FF autohinter. Question is just whether it'll produce anything good... You can improve it by editing the parameters for PS hinting, but if you're putting effort in that you can just as well put the effort in ttf hinting at once... I think there's a real difference in effort there.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory
Jonadab the Unsightly One jona...@bright.net skribis: And let me expand on that a little more: since the Google Font Directory fonts are not just ASCII but Latin-1 (plus Euro and maybe a couple of other things), they're good for almost all websites written in not just English but virtually any European language, and a good number of non-European languages as well. Latin-1 won't get you very far outside of Western Europe. I myself can't get by with it, because I need ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ and ŭ for Esperanto. I'm not a vast majority of anything, however. :)
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] workflow hints
Ben Laenen benlae...@gmail.com skribis: Anyway, FontForge's normalized SFD format is by far the best we've got for collaborative font development. Actually, George Williams has recommended OpenType. As if to prove so, he has those extra tables in which you can stash the same information as would go into the sfd. Of course, a program needs to know how to read those tables, to make any use of them. But the issues involved are complicated. I'll say more about them, elsewhere.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] workflow hints
Alexandre Prokoudine alexandre.prokoud...@gmail.com skribis: I'm finally looking inside http://oflb.open-fonts.org/foo-open-font-sources-2.0.tar.gz that Nicolas mentioned during his talk at LGM. Is there some kind of description of the recommended workflow? Like doing everything in separate UFO files and then combining them in FF, or working on a FontForge project and then exporting all glyphs to separate files using some script. Stuff like that. Anyone? For collaborative development the biggest problem (to my thinking) is how to merge changes gracefully using a source code management system designed mainly for separate compilation units. Perhaps UFO is a solution to this problem, but I don't know. There is no way it would work for me; I've got my stuff in a combination of sfd, feature files, and python, with fontforge features hijacked to perform tasks for which they never were intended. My fear is that UFO will be to fontmaking as GNU Hurd is to GNU. Making tools to ease merging of sfd fonts seems, perhaps, a more worthwhile endeavor. If some people are using fontforge and others are using proprietary ware then the problem arises of how to keep the project itself from being a slave to the proprietary ware, and that might be really difficult. It would be necessary that nothing peculiar to the proprietary editor be contained in the font; and the proprietary editor would have to be able to handle peculiarities of fontforge that it might encounter. In the case of my own fonts, it would have to handle my spacing-by-anchors system, which may be a nontrivial requirement. Often it is best simply to say Use GNU make rather than try to write a Makefile that works on everything. :)
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] workflow hints
Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org skribis: On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 05:12:30PM +0200, Ben Laenen wrote: Khaled Hosny wrote: On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 09:32:48AM +0200, Ben Laenen wrote: On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:53 AM, Peter Baker b.ta...@gmail.com wrote: Couple of quick points. First, the FontForge format has always been plain text. It works well with CVS, SVN, etc. Only if you cut out the unneeded bits like we do with DejaVu. If we would forget to run that script and commit a change to SVN we'd get something like a 2 MB patch. Not my experience, I do post-edit the file before committing, but it is usually few cosmetics, nothing big, the last time I used the dejavu scripts they broke my files, my be I did something wrong, but this was a while ago and I didn't check again since then. FF remembers which windows were opened, several settings, which glyph points were selected etc. This can all be discarded. I know, I was actually commenting on the 2 MB patch part, since I felt it is a bit exaggerating. Not for me, because I often use huge bitmap images, which sfd inconveniently stores in the one big file for no particular reason, and it's non-trivial to get stuff out of a Mercurial repository that you put there by mistake. I suppose just making an sfd breakable into distinctive parts would help solve a lot of issues. We've got to start making these fontforge changes ourselves, but I'm not happy working on a program that is written in glorified PDP-11 assembly language. Doing that is how I ended up disabled. :)
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Oflb.org
vernon adams v...@newtypography.co.uk skribis: The onus is on open, not free. That seems to be in line with the oflb. It's secondary that the software is free (as in ££$$). Open is almost worthless when it comes to fonts; it is uncommon to find a font that isn't in a fixable and modifiable. Sure, it would be nice to have the feature file scripts, or whatever, but not having them isn't a serious problem. What matters is that the fonts are free software -- not freeware. I myself have been reluctant to accept the OFL in part because it has that restriction on unbundled selling. If that weren't a provision with a loophole a couple of parsecs wide, I probably wouldn't make OFL versions of my fonts. It's good to see the new system going online, because the old system rejected my fonts one day and swallowed them whole the next. :)
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Oflb.org
Dave Crossland d...@lab6.com skribis: So the text by the icons at the top saying Get: Download Fonts, Share: Upload Your Fonts, Remix: Improve Extend isn't clear enough... okay. It's not at all clear that the site has anything to do with free software. The name of the site adds to the confusion between openness and freeness, so actually, I think, one may have to make a special effort to get the point across that this is a free software site. Don't blame me for that being difficult to do; blame Captain Gnu. :)
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Kernest’s Web Font Serving En gine – Fontue – Now Open Source
Oh, I forgot to say: An easy way to see what fonts are used at a site is the Font Finder extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4415
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Kernest’s Web Font Serving En gine – Fontue – Now Open Source
Nicolas Spalinger nicolas_spalin...@sil.org skribis: I like the way you're not hiding the origin, license and other metadata of the libre/open fonts you include in your catalog (Ahem unlike others apparently: http://readableweb.com/typekit-and-copyright-fraud/ but they promised they will work on clarifying it..) More like blog fraud, if you ask me. :) But TypeKit did make the mistake of writing language that sounds legal, rather than English. (The ISC license is the only I can think of that is written in English, and for that you have to disregard the disclaimer, which is written in Alpha Centauran.) TypeKit embeds my fonts, as a service to others; they should embed the copyright string with the font, but it doesn't really matter, because I do not require attribution when someone embeds my fonts. Some _do_ require attribution for embedding (Jos Buivenga, for one), but I'm not sure it's TypeKit who needs to do the attributing; rather the website using the font. Personally, I think requiring attribution for the use of a text font is somewhat like requiring a painter to follow the signature with a note about what brand of paint, brushes, palettes, and easles were used.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Some progress!
Dave Crossland d...@lab6.com skribis: What isn't working now is support in the GCFP interactive typesetting system for full families, because I can't figure out how to pass the family variants to pcfp. The output of fc-list as the Apache user is: I don't know the details, but as a general matter you do not want to use fontconfig to find font families, because it doesn't know how to do so. When it finds font families, it is a common but lucky accident. This is why I dirty-hack my own fontconfig, because programs like GIMP and Inkscape use fontconfig to find font families, which fontconfig doesn't know how to do. Perhaps it should, but I don't have the energy to pursue the matter. (Perhaps OFLB will.)
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB
Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org skribis: On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 10:29:00AM +0100, Nicolas Spalinger wrote: Dave? Ben? Jon? What about the new site? I'm holding my breath for a functional GNU hurd on which I'll run LaTeX3 using final STIX fonts downloaded from the new OFLB website. If I may interject as a font developer and font user. There's a serious issue buried in there, which is that free fonts do not have font-functional free software on which to run, and it keeps on being like that. I am developing for TeXies (whose software is _mostly_ functional) and for the users of what some call slaveware. I have to write my own software to test and use my own Latin-script fonts. OFLB really ought to be able to provide software bundles, I think, with font collections bundled with software that actually works, in which one can actually access the fonts in an Adobe Opticals collection and actually get the fonts asked for, in which OpenType tags can be selected, and so on. Starter kits. That's how ordinary people get drawn into the font world. That's part of how to make OFLB and the bundled-software projects very, very popular. But the fonts actually have to work in the software.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] PT Sans
Dave Crossland d...@lab6.com skribis: Since no permission to modify the OFL text has been given to anyone ... How do you know this? I haven't been following too closely, but since there is still a dispute I imagine that no one has asked whether permission was given or whether anyone gives a hoot.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] PT Sans
Dave Crossland d...@lab6.com skribis: I give a hoot, because if I am mistaken, that would have interesting implications for my work :-) I meant, of course, whether the literature's copyright holder cared; the plain text file, which I recently used, and I guess unlike the GPL, has nothing in it showing that SIL cared. Personally, I agree on not hosting it with a goofy licen(s|c)e, whether it is plagiarized or not. People always have the option of distributing elsewhere.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] PT Sans
Christoph Schäfer christoph-schae...@gmx.de skribis: Hi Dave, in other circumstances I'd enjoy a detailed discussion, but a dictum stating a font is not legally redistributable simply because the creator uses a modified license defies not only common sense, but also the spirit of open licensing. I think Dave may be interpreting the provision that says a font licensed OFL cannot be redistributed under a modified license to mean that no one can modify the OFL license.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Can I submit a GPL3 + Font Exception font?
j_mach_w...@shared-files.de skribis: On Wed Sep 16 16:59:06 PDT 2009, Dave Crossland wrote: Add it the queue at http://www.openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Existing_Free_Fonts :-) Does this mean it is not possible to upload a GPLv3 + Font Exception font to the OpenFontLibrary? I have this new GPLv3 + Font Exception font and I'm searching for a place to publish it. With a deviantART.com account you could publish it there and then provide a link to your account on the page mentioned by Dave.
