Hello! I filled in the form about a month ago for a new project, a font service.
Wot dat? The problem being addressed is that fonts are too hard, especially in the graphic design & typography arenas. Libre graphics software today is behind a lot of proprietary software in ability to use opentype fonts, to access font features, to select variable font instances, to change colours in colour fonts, to apply variation selectors automatically, let alone to use some of the newer OpenType features such as AVAR 2 or HOI, but, there are fonts out there that use these features (OK, not so much AVAR 2 yet but all the others). In addition, installing and using a font can be confusing in the presence of containerized apps (FlatPak, Docker, etc), as to whether the program can access system or user fonts. The proposal: A dbus service. An application user opens a text tool. The application sends a "list of fonts" message to the dbus service, which is started if needed. A UI appears, and the user can choose one or more fonts, can choose a font from a list, can add/remove folders to find fonts, can configure a font (opentype features, variant characters, variation selectors, axes, colours...), can make lists of fonts e.g. for specific projects, can find fonts by tag as well as by name or folder or feature. The result is sent back to the application. The service would also be able to send the font file to the application, so that containered applications could access fonts installed outside the desktop. This originally came up in the context of improving OpenType support in GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Better to improve OpenType support across the desktop (any desktop, not only GNOME or KDE), and also to be cross-platform. Hence, the UI could be provided by GIMP, but also by the desktop, so KDE users would get a Qt-bnased one, GNOME users a Gtk-based one, and Enlightenment users would... er... could use the GIMP one or have an eFont program. Discussion at the libregaphicsmeeting.org conference in Rennes this past May suggested cross-application support, with interest from GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and others. The work is difficult, requires very specialist knowledge, so that individual programs haven't taken it on, or have done a partial job (i just went to enable Historical Ligatures for a project using LibreOffice and it wasn't offered as a choice...; others support variable font axes but without preview... etc etc) I’d like, we [GIMP] would like, to host something somewhere application and platform neutral, hence approaching xdg. If we work together we can make all the things better. What do you think? liam -- Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/ Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/ XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting. Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations: http://www.fromoldbooks.org
