And then, it appears, you are suggesting that I should suspend my script encoding activities, deal with the (to me) very steep FontLab learning curve to get my SMP fonts working properly, then give them all away for free, and hope that there's some Germanicist out there sitting on a pile of money just waiting for that free Gothic font....
I had assumed that Everson Typography, which offers "to make available high-quality fonts" (from http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/index.html), already had the expertise required to make such fonts work properly.
Sigh.
I think I make nice outlines. People seem to like them. I don't find the new font tools to be very friendly, however. There are still many cross-platform problems, if you want to support older as well as newer systems. Then there's the horror of OT vs AAT and all sorts of scripting and command-line tools that must be great if you're a programmer. Perhaps you will forgive me for not investing my abundant spare time in dealing with such a high learning curve. I already have enough to do typesetting to pay the rent (fonts don't, especially if you give them away) in order to fund the time I need to spend on script proposals and standardization travel. Never mind a mortgage, given the housing market in the country I live in.
In an ideal situation, I'd be working on Unicode full-time for the next eight years doing nothing but script proposals. The world doesn't seem to be able to offer me such employment, because as I've said, you can't sell alphabets to anyone. Do you think we enjoy holding out the begging bowl? We do it because we feel we must. Yet you've been saying: "Give us more for free." I'm sorry you can't feel more supportive. We need support. Unicode needs support. The unencoded scripts need support.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
