Re: [OpenFontLibrary] LGM 2011
Dave Crossland wrote: > Hello Libre Font people, > > For the last few weeks there's been a discussion over on the CREATE > list about LGM 2011. There are 3 proposals, in alphabetical order: > > Brasil http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011_Brasil_Bid > > Canada http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011_Montréal_Bid > > Vietnam http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011_Vietnam_Bid > > Please read them, and reply to this on-list with your order of > preference. I'll do that myself in a moment, so you can see what I > hope you'll reply with :-) Hi everyone, My preference would be Vietnam, Montréal/Canada, Brasil. > (Even if you didn't attend previous conferences, are not planning to > attend next year, your input is welcome :-) > > If you can spare the time, please also answer these questions: > > a1) YES/NO: Do you have enough information to decide LGM venues for 2011? Yes. > a2) If no, please describe tentatively yes > b1) Will you make it to Brasil if LGM is there in 2011? tentatively yes > b2) Will you make it to Canada if LGM is there in 2011? tentatively yes > b3) Will you make it to Vietnam if LGM is there in 2011? tentatively yes > c1) Are you satisfied overall by the process to decide the venue on > the wiki? (Explained at > http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011 if you haven't been > following) Well, there's always this tendency of overpromising and trying to be everything to everyone... (especially from folks who may not actually commit to do the work...) which dilutes the focus, delays our plans and burns out contributors. > d1) What do you think of the bidding process? > d2) Should we keep it as it is, a one-year process, or change to a > two-year process? A 2-year process is probably better for planning. All my LGM participations since the very first one in Lyon have really been in rush mode: I do realise it's no easy task but more long-term visibility of important items like dates/location/participation of others/programme/etc would allow for more preparation, higher inter-team interactions and bigger impact. > d3) Do you have enough information to make a real choice? Please explain. Well, at this stage probably yes although some factors closer to the date are not under our control. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Downloadable fonts
> I also working with Raph and Nicolas Spalinger on improving the > directory structure and packaing of the GFD hg repo; some of the > FONTLOGs for the fonts aren't there, and so on Yes, work on improving the upstream repository wrt. best practises and long-term maintainership is underway. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory
Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote: > Alexandre Prokoudine writes: > >> Am I the only person who thinks that having Cyrillics ditched from >> both Droid Sans and Old Standard is a bugger? > > For most of the English-speaking world, having that stripped out is a > good thing. Think of the bandwidth, if nothing else. Remember, these > are intended for @font-face embedding, which means every single > visitor to the page (whose browser supports it) is retrieving a copy > of the font. You want that to be relatively small if possible. > > Of course, if someone in the Slavic world wants to host some public > web fonts that do have Cyrillic support, that would also be great. > Similarly, if Baidu or somebody wants to host embeddable fonts with > Chinese characters, hey, good for them. Well... thankfully the different $language-speaking worlds increasingly intermesh in real life and on the web, so "optimizing" for bandwidth shouldn't automatically result in consciously or unconsciously making users of other writing systems blind or mute... Another *important optimisation target* to bear in mind is actually reaching a larger audience beyond the commonly-known writing systems. We need to realise that ultimately various people don't care about _blinding fast_, what they want is _works in my language_ :-) A much simpler example would be when English speakers borrow French words with accents and so on... Optimizing that out so that it can't be used sounds like a poor choice in the tradeoff... Touché :-) OTOH no font family can offer everything to everyone, it's down to the efforts towards making the particular tradeoff(s) inclusive and not too ethnocentric depending on the particular website... IMHO "why can't they all use my writing system?" isn't exactly the best angle from where to look at the issue. We are in a position where increased support for lesser-known languages can happen as well. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory
On 05/19/2010 10:59 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > On 5/19/10, Garrick Van Buren wrote: > >> This is fantastic - a huge win for the OFL. Great work. > > Am I the only person who thinks that having Cyrillics ditched from > both Droid Sans and Old Standard is a bugger? > > Alexandre Given the many i18n-aware folks at Google and Raph Levien's post about plans for future community interaction, I'm hopeful that expansion of the Unicode coverage and smarts is next on the menu :-) Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory
Garrick Van Buren wrote: > Nicolas, > > This is fantastic - a huge win for the OFL. Great work. Well, I'm certainly glad that the licensing model has empowered various designers to get Google's attention and support, but the kudos really goes to all the work done by the designers of the font themselves to get picked in the first place :-) BTW did you take a look at http://github.com/typekit/webfontloader ? Might be useful for your own service. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory
Dave Crossland wrote: > Hi, > > http://code.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Cantarell :-) > http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/getting_started.html Congrats! From OFLB folks I can see that your Cantarell, Dennis' Molengo and Barry's Goudy are part of the initial offering of the Directory. Kudos! Planet open fonts has Raph's recent advogato diary post on the subject (and mine too). Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction
On 05/09/2010 03:14 AM, Garrick Van Buren wrote: > Nicolas, > > The short answer is - I like them and they're consistent with the direction > Kernest is pointing. Just need to work out the specifics. Good to hear that you're taking into account community feedback. IMHO enlightened businessmen tend to do this and reap some benefits :-) It's obviously your call but I really think it will be helpful to make your work and service stand out from the gazillions "free font" sites and better deal with how the vast majority of real designers badly react to that loaded term... Seeing how you're blazing the trail :-) Let me (us) know how I (we) can help with the specifics. Last I checked Kernest offers more than 700 fonts tagged "free" and these fonts have big variations in terms of what users are and aren't actually allowed to do with them Way too confusing. to rehash the suggestions for better classification of the font offerings and keeping away from problematic mislabelling: - gratis: when your subscribers don't pay for the particular item - libre/open fonts: fonts released by their authors under licenses allowing use/copy/modification/redistribution officially recognized by FLOSS entities like FSF and OSI: OFL, MIT/X11, etc. - freeware: distribution-only fonts, no modification rights, usually foundry-specific Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction
Garrick Van Buren wrote: > Nicolas, > > Thanks for the update on that unfortunate bug. Great to hear it's fixed. > > I just committed a update of the fontforge_font_optimizer.pe - it no longer > includes the workaround for that MS bug. > > I agree - needing to change metadata to get fonts to successfully render is > an awkward proposition. Hi Garrick, Thanks for your quick and positive answer on this front and for pushing the fix. I hope you'll restore the original metadata tables of the libre/open fonts which you offer to your subscribers. It is not just an awkward position, it is offensive to many designers. Surely not what you want. So thanks for fixing the situation. What is your feeling about s/free/gratis/g and about the linkbacks and community sponsoring suggestions of the earlier thread? Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction
>> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978909/ >> >> This article says that a regression was introduced by security update >> 961371. The regression imposes an artificial 2,500 character length >> limitation on strings that are contained in OpenType or TrueType fonts. >> They mean 2.5K Unicode characters, or 5000 bytes. >> >> A subsequent security update, 972270, has restored the character length >> limitation for individual strings to 64 KB (32,768 Unicode characters), >> matching the OpenType specification. >> >> Carry on embedding! > > > Hey that was quick :-) > Thanks for researching this and posting the precise details! > > Good to know the bug was fixed. Thanks to the MS folks for their efforts > in getting this resolved. > > We can carry on metadata-ing as well :-) > And adjust the checks in the open font design toolkit. Fontforge's new stable release has this in the changelog (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/changelog.html#change-log) " Some time ago MS put in a patch to their OS so that they would refuse to load a font with a name table >5K. They have now decided that was an error http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978909/ And have removed the limitation. So remove the warning ff used to generate about name tables bigger than 5K. " So no need to resort to mangling the metadata to make things "work" again because of this Windows-only limitation and deviation from the published spec. For example line 26 to 42 in http://github.com/garrickvanburen/Fontue/blob/master/workflow/fontforge_font_optimizer.pe should be dropped. The better solution is not stripping away metadata but getting upstream to fix such mistakes. Seriously, replacing official metadata the authors themselves have put in with garbage isn't exactly very nice. Quite clearly copyright infringement and breach of licenses. Certainly not the way to get open font designers to respect you. Please don't do it ever. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Kernest’s Web Font Serving E ngine – Fontue – Now Open Source
On 04/22/2010 02:19 AM, Barry Schwartz wrote: > 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 there's also Firefontfamily https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/111672 and TypeGauge: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9972 Very handy when designing or to learn more about a particular font but but at this stage they don't show origin and authorship metadata. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Kernest’s Web Font Serving E ngine – Fontue – Now Open Source
On 04/22/2010 02:15 AM, Barry Schwartz wrote: > Nicolas Spalinger 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.) Ha ha ha :-D I thought that the Alpha Centaurans would be using a more complicated writing system... but they just go for CAPITAL LETTERS then? Hey, that would explain the high quality of OpenBSD ;-D Seriously, the general mistake is mislabeling and miscategorizing creations that upstream authors have released under their chosen licenses (whatever it may be) and sweeping that under a superset EULA. All I'm saying is that these brokers shouldn't deliberately hide what authors have chosen to do with their creation as they distribute or provide subscriptions. It's rather disingenuous otherwise. > 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. IMHO it's great that typekit provides a service to others allowing them easier access to your work. (BTW the link to your personal website and other creations you have published is 404 on your typekit profile). But people going through catalogs of such brokers will want to know the details of what they are allowed to do before using/subscribing to the given 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. Requiring (or not) attribution in the resulting artwork or document (such as in a small colophon) is orthogonal to requiring the copyright and licensing notice not be hidden, removed and overriden by a global license... In many licenses the former is optional (usually appreciated) but the latter is mandatory. My feeling is that in the knowledge society/economy you could argue that hiding or stripping away authorship information is one of the worst crimes whereas a mention in a colophon somewhere (or more generally some kind of linkback) is appreciated by most authors. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Kernest’s Web Font Serving En gine – Fontue – Now Open Source
Garrick Van Buren wrote: > I've open-sourced Kernest's underlying font serving engine. > > Info > here: > http://blog.kernest.com/archive/kernests-web-font-serving-engine-fontue-now-open-source Hi Garrick, Quick note to say thanks a lot for all your efforts in this area and releasing your font serving component under MIT/X11 (and with some documentation too). Interesting approach ! Do you have any stats on the preferred formats you currently support? 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..) but I really recommend you move away from the confusing "free" description: please consider saying Gratis when you don't make your subscribers directly pay for the given font and libre/open when you describe fonts released under community-approved licenses allowing distribution / modification / study / redistribution. This clarification will benefit everyone. Please do it. You're benefiting (and rightly so, it's great!) from the work of font designers who have released their creation under a community-recognized license so please don't misrepresent their work by wrapping it under confusing blanket terms... You could also consider some more linkbacks to the open font community websites or even some small amount of support/sponsoring of community efforts around collaborative font design (a tiny percentage of profit on libre/open fonts given back to encourage community efforts which will then benefit you?)... (A very minor thing: s/browswer/browser/g) Thanks again! -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] PT sans dual-licensed now
Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Dave Crossland wrote: > >> This has the SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.0 - 22 November 2005 - >> and the current version is 1.1 - http://scripts.sil.org/OFL#5667e9e4 >> >> I will email Paratype about this. > > Um, already acknowledged and to be fixed in few days. > > Alexandre Thanks (or rather Спасибо!) for all the advocacy efforts to convince them of doing a proper OFL release of this high-quality font family! Great to see their reaction to community input as indicated on http://www.paratype.com/cinfo/news.asp?NewsId=318 (website in English) I think this is great news for many writing systems used throughout the Russian Federation. PTSans_OFL.zip does have what is needed (the minimum): the fonts themselves with metadata filled in and a separate license file for OFL 1.1 containing the copyright notice header and the chosen reserved font names. |-- PTC55F.ttf |-- PTC75F.ttf |-- PTN57F.ttf |-- PTN77F.ttf |-- PTS55F.ttf |-- PTS56F.ttf |-- PTS75F.ttf |-- PTS76F.ttf `-- PTSansOFL.txt A quick look at the metadata (with PTC55F.ttf for example) shows: Fontname: PTSans-Caption Version: 2.003 Weight: Book Copyright: Copyright © 2009 ParaType Ltd. All rights reserved. License URL: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_web Designer URL: http://www.paratype.com/help/designers/ Designer: A.Korolkova, O.Umpeleva, V.Yefimov Vendor URL: http://www.paratype.com Description: PT Sans is a type family of universal use. It consists of 8 styles: regular and bold weights with corresponding italics form a standard computer font family; two narrow styles (regular and bold) are intended for documents that require tight set; two caption styles (regular and bold) are for texts of small point sizes. The design combines traditional conservative appearance with modern trends of humanistic sans serif and characterized by enhanced legibility. These features beside conventional use in business applications and printed stuff made the fonts quite useable for direction and guide signs, schemes, screens of information kiosks and other objects of urban visual communications. The fonts next to standard Latin and Cyrillic character sets contain signs of title languages of the national republics of Russian Federation and support the most of the languages of neighboring countries. The fonts were developed and released by ParaType in 2009 with financial support from Federal Agency of Print and Mass Communications of Russian Federation. Design - Alexandra Korolkova with assistance of Olga Umpeleva and supervision of Vladimir Yefimov. Trademark: PT Sans is a trademark of the ParaType Ltd. I'll take care of getting this nicely packaged on the Debian/Ubuntu side of things. BTW about their project-specific license available and linked to from http://www.paratype.com/public/pt_openlicense_eng.asp you may want you point out the following bugs: - need to sync descriptions between "pt openlicense agreement" and "free font licensing agreement" - distinguishing between embedding in documents and fontlinking in webpages is much better: "embedding in documents and Web pages" -> "embedding in documents and font linking in webpages" - "by itself" -> "by themselves" - "free downloading" and "they are free" are very ambiguous Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction
Paul Flo Williams wrote: > Dave wrote: >> Interesting: this effects us, I think. A url of a license is not as ideal >> as >> the full license text, but I guess will have to do. > > Please read this: > > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978909/ > > This article says that a regression was introduced by security update > 961371. The regression imposes an artificial 2,500 character length > limitation on strings that are contained in OpenType or TrueType fonts. > They mean 2.5K Unicode characters, or 5000 bytes. > > A subsequent security update, 972270, has restored the character length > limitation for individual strings to 64 KB (32,768 Unicode characters), > matching the OpenType specification. > > Carry on embedding! Hey that was quick :-) Thanks for researching this and posting the precise details! Good to know the bug was fixed. Thanks to the MS folks for their efforts in getting this resolved. We can carry on metadata-ing as well :-) And adjust the checks in the open font design toolkit. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction
Chris Lilley wrote: > On Thursday, March 18, 2010, 6:36:29 PM, Dave wrote: > > DC> Hi, DC> Interesting: this effects us, I think. A url of a > license is not DC> as ideal as the full license text, but I guess > will have to do. > > I reported that back in August (thread title was "Verbose license > text in a font"). > > You responded that validators should be aware of that, maybe issue a > warning. > > Nicholas responded to argue against vagueness in font licensing > (which seemed to me unrelated to a choice between embedding and > linking to the exact same license) and to argue against a "windows > limitation" having any impact on Libre Fonts. Mmm, what I really meant to say was that recommended best practises when designing and releasing open fonts do include properly filling in the metadata and being more descriptive then your usual proprietary font. Licensing rights/freedoms/obligations as indicated by authors travel with the licensed item itself and don't rely on some pre-negociated remote obscure reference as is so common in proprietary restricted fonts: "font software foo in licensed to you by Foo foundry under the terms of the licensing agreement you have received". I don't see how different types of use should lead to inclusion of different texts in that field. Both the full text of the license and its external URL reference should be present inside the font sources. It is a requirement of all libre licenses that you don't strip away such copyright and licensing statements. Certainly a requirement of the OFL to convey what the authors have decided to use as their licensing model for that particular font. You still need to know your rights/freedoms/obligations even if the network is unreachable. Also only recently are some tools able to reveal the URL fields in the font metadata, and it's not widespread yet (working on it). The full licensing included in the font is therefore more important at this stage. Transparency and Digital Rights Expression turn out to be useful for everyone. This is why one of the focus of the successful WOFF format is also useful metadata placeholders. Open fonts are not limited to a single platform and I expressed the personal opinion that this limitation from a particular platform wasn't a particularly good reason to change all that. IOW more like a bug to fix on that particular platform instead of a whole established best practise to change on all other platforms. I have lacked time to investigate all the details but (I can be totally wrong and this is my very own opinion) but I find it suspicious that because of "security reasons" descriptive metadata (extremely useful for both users and other designers) should be excluded or strongly limited to the point of being useless: this particular field contains only text. Sounds fishy to me is all I'm saying. Who has a link to the MS security bulletin ID? Who has first-hand experience of the bug we are talking about? > Since I had merely asked for information, had suggested no change, > and since I was unaware that preventing Windows users from using > Libre fonts was a goal, I let the matter drop. No, we certainly don't want to exclude any particular platform from enjoying libre/open fonts: now matter how widely used it may be. But I guess we don't want any particular platform imposing problematic limitations on all the others either. I think this limitation would impact way too many fonts and working to get the upstream bug fixed is probably a better approach. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] [CREATE] [Fwd: LGM 2010 et Francophonie (OIF)]
Femke Snelting wrote: > Hello / Bonjour! > > This week we were contacted by the Institut de la Francophonie numérique > (IFN/OIF) and they offer support for translation costs EN/FR plus travel > + lodging for 10 participants in LGM 2010 from countries connected to > the OIF network. > > It means you could present your project in French without losing your > Anglophone audience and vice versa ;-) but it is also a great > opportunity to expand the network of developers involved in LGM Sounds like an good opportunity for more francophones to benefit from contributing to the libre graphics community. Here's one possibility I can think of: In 2009 I've been in touch with various people living in Vietnam and interested in working on improving the availability and quality of open fonts for Vietnamese. Last I heard, the plan was to review and contribute Vietnamese support to existing open font families but possibly also to design/commission/release a new open font family made from scratch and then get the resulting software distributed, included in the various libre projects throughout Vietnam (liveCDs for example, office suite bundles, etc) and promoted instead of restricted fonts. They are based in Hanoi, Vietnam and affiliated to Hanoilug and CNF: http://blog.hanoilug.org/ http://www.auf.org/regions/asie-pacifique/implantations/campus-hanoi/fiche.html Seems to fit the criteria. What do you think? I will ping them about this possibility to come to LGM. Maybe people working with ANLoc could also benefit from the opportunity: http://www.africanlocalisation.net/en/fonts > I roughly translated; see below for more precise criteria in French. It > is going to be a bit of an administrative hassle to make this work so I > hope you trust us with drawing up the final list. > > Just to be extra clear: we seem to be doing more or less doing ok with > finding money for LGM -- those 10 participants coming in through > Francophonie will not replace anyone that would normally be supported > for his/her participation in LGM. > > more on practical things (hotels, venue, signing up) after this weekend. > > > Femke Thanks for all the organisation efforts. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB
[...] > I can't but agree with you on the chronic deficiency of good, > typographically aware free software, apart from the 30 years old TeX, > in fact the only way to utilize goodies of OpenType fonts is by using > some variant of TeX (LuaTeX is my preferred). The free "DTP" application > can't even do simple things like standard ligatures! What about your experiments hooking up XeTex with Scribus? A more recent experiment is described here and points back to your work: http://www.gastarbeiter.se/post/2010/02/22/scribus-xetex-opentype http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=8136 http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=8876 > Regards, > Khaled Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] New Ubuntu Font
Jon Phillips wrote: > If someone drafts an email, I will join on and make sure it gets to > shuttleworth and jono...we should try to engage them constructively. Mark is already well-aware of the various issues surrounding libre/open fonts from previous face to face and email discussions over the past development cycles of Ubuntu and also about the commissioning/release/maintainership of Ubuntu-title and the relationships with the trademark policy. Earlier on, he was one of the key community figures involved in the review of the OFL model and he gave his insights and support to the effort. Ahem, it seems to me (prove me wrong) that Mark/Canonical/Ubuntu have their act together better than the OpenFontLibrary at this stage... Let's focus on the work of getting the OFLB established before promising we do more... Also the new open font for Ubuntu/Canonical is still being worked on and there is still some time before they do the first public release. I think some designers from Ubuntu will be at the upcoming LGM, sounds like the ideal place to make plans for other open font design workshops - especially with Pierre and Ludivine's (and other OPS-ers I presume) open foundry http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/foundry/ - and see how we may get involved in commissioned font efforts. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] New Ubuntu Font
Khaled Hosny wrote: > On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 02:31:17PM +0100, Dave Crossland wrote: >> "We are considering an internship program, to support aspiring >> fontographers from all corners of the world to visit London and work >> with Dalton Maag to extend the font to their own regional glyph set." >> is very cool. > > Very interesting! By mere coincidence, I'm preparing for an Arabic font > directed mainly for user interfaces and readability on screens, one have > to watch this Ubuntu font closely. Yeah for branding and interface fonts taking into account the needs of the various scripts right from the beginning :-) I find the following in Mark's post to be very good too: "The work has been commissioned from world-renowned fontographers Dalton Maag, who have expressed excitement at the opportunity to publish an open font and also a font that they know will be used daily by millions of people." I think it's up to us as a community to think about ways where we can come alongside these established designers commissioned to do open font design to mutually learn and share tools, methodologies and corresponding best practises and as a result improve the overall trajectories of open font projects creation and maintainership. The articulation of existing community-based open font projects and commissioned projects such as this one will probably be quite interesting... Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB
Khaled Hosny wrote: > 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. I admire your patience :-) But is it really vaporware when a beta is already out with sources? > Regards, > Khaled Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB
Daniel Johnson wrote: > I've noticed a number of non-font uploads (and some outright spam) > posted on OFLB recently. I haven't done an exhaustive search, but the > following uploads are not fonts. The first is spam, and the other > three are just images. > > custom research paper > Untitled-2 > Wilson Vision (WARPED) > LogoArgonauticos > > Is there a plan in place to ensure that every OFLB entry has a font attached? Yes, IIRC from previous discussions (and also podcasts) each submission needs to be in the form of a tarball/zip file with a minimum set of files: font software in ttf/otf, FONTLOG (and then as much extended sources files as possible are encouraged to be included as seen fit by the uploader). The recent spam problems prove the need for appropriate moderation and review steps to be in place otherwise we get easily spammed and the library sadly turns into a junkyard... :-( (not to say that you can't find gems in a junkyard but well it's much harder... and not everyone likes to do it...) Dave? Ben? Jon? What about the new site? > Cheers, > Daniel_J Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] An index for OFL fonts
Peter Baker wrote: > I've been lurking on this list for a while, never posted here before. > Hi everyone! > > A couple of weeks ago, in response to a query on the XeTeX list, I > wrote a little Python/FontForge script (called "fontswith") that > searches through a directory (with all its subdirectories) looking for > fonts with a specific set of glyphs. Turns out that this is a common > sort of need, and various people have produced home-rolled solutions > (Perl scripts, PHP scripts ...). Mine has a number of friendly > command-line switches, can search ttf, otf, ttc, pfb and pfa fonts, > and can speed searches by building an index for future use. Hi Peter, Thanks a lot for creating and releasing such an incredibly useful utility! Previously I used this tiny script (which allows for some visual comparison): http://utilities.open-fonts.org/compfont and fontaine's coverage info: http://unifont.org/fontaine/ (BTW attacking the problem from another angle: Martin Hosken also wrote a little utility using his very capable fonts:TTF module to compare a text corpus against coverage of existing fonts and report missing codepoints). > A little while after Iwan Gabovitch posted the link to an archive of > OFL fonts it suddenly occurred to me that one didn't actually have to > have fonts installed or even present on the system in order to search; > one just had to have the index. So I've made an index for the OFL and > posted it along with my script, here: > > http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/fontswith/ > > There's only one hitch, namely that several of the fonts in the > archive are inaccessible for some reason: instead of the font, I have > a 14-byte text file containing just the phrase "file not found." These > are the fonts in question: > > OFL-OSP_-_NotCourier-sans.ttf > OFL-OSP_-_NotCourier-sans_1.ttf The nice OSP folks can probably provide us with this one separately if needed. > OFL-PhaistosDisk_-_Layne_Rook.ttf > PD-chemoelectric_-_Goudy_Bookletter_1.otf Seems there's an upstream page here: http://home.comcast.net/~crudfactory/cf3/gb1911.xhtml > PD-Daniel_J_-_Rahel.otf > > I suppose there's some easy fix for this; Yes hopefully these can become accessible for review again. > but in the meantime I hope > folks will enjoy having a simple way to discover which OFL fonts have > glyphs that answer some particular need. Thanks for providing that service. IIRC Dave's presentation of the features of the OFLB at the last LGM had a nice php frontend with jquery and fontaine magic underneath to report interactively on the coverage of a font, a font covering part of the Turkish writing systems was used as an example I think. > Best wishes, > Peter Baker Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] A preview of the fonts on OFL (includes a backup of nearly all fonts and a way to download them)
> I recommend focusing on the remaining integration tasks and the font > audit. > > > Do you mean quality control? Or copyright control? (Or both?) First the appropriate licensing and authorship checks but then the quality control of the fonts themselves is also a goal: tarball structure with required files, FONTLOG, coverage, etc as Ed and Ben have developed the tools and interfaces for that. I realize that quality criteria can be subjective but need to a way to separate the wheat from the chaf. We're aiming for quality offering: a smaller selection but certified to be under the appropriate libre licenses and overall of much higher quality than the junk (or rare gems with a lot of junk mixed in) you usually find on freeware sites. > Can we be sure that the currently available fonts on OFLB are all > licensed under the licenses that are attached to them? (The PD and OFL > icons) Yes, there are already various problems with many fonts currently uploaded. Hence the need for a full audit before launch. > The insecurity of possibly illegally included fonts would be the main > blocker for creating auto-packages in my eyes. This is one of the > motivations I had for creating the previews: having more eyes being able > to look at the fonts and warn us if they see one that is non-free. (On > the other hand: I am absolutely unable to tell if a font is legally > OFL-licensed/PD or not. How should anybody else..) Exactly, and package maintainer never like having to deal with packages under multiple licenses. Gigantic packages with lots of different licenses, origins, authors and end-purposes are a big no-no when they can easily be split like the policies require for fonts in major distros like Debian and Fedora. > One way would be to have one folder with all the non-free fonts of the > world and one with all the ones from OFLB and compare md5 sums or render > them and compare the md5 sums of the rendered images. Not realistic > unfortunately. Yes we're certainly not going to check the whole world. But we need to make sure our own stuff is checked and validated and that we drop the dubious stuff. Seriously, we leave that stuff to the gazillion freeware font sites. > Or are my fears without reason and in fact every submission has been > looked at by multiple font professionals from the libre font community > so there is a fair amount of safety? :) That's what we need to do so that users of the library can trust that only validated and quality items are available. > Clarification: I am talking about people uploading non-free freeware > fonts out of good will, not people taking for-sale fonts, modifying them > and uploading them to make OFLB have legal problems, which is something > I don't believe is going to happen. Well this has already happened. Even with a lot of goodwill we make mistakes :-) But we need to be reactive in getting them fixed to maintain the quality focus of the library otherwise people will simply loose interest. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] A preview of the fonts on OFL (includes a backup of nearly all fonts and a way to download them)
Liam R E Quin wrote: > On Sun, 2010-02-14 at 21:27 +0100, Nicolas Spalinger wrote: > [...] >> I hate to rain on this parade but seriously, I don't think this is such >> a good idea at all! >> >> I doubt your automatically produced deb or rpm is up to the standards to >> become part of a distro archive. > > Depends on the distribution :-) but the current standard is > "not there at all" for most distributions. > > We've been over 500 years without previews on the OLFB site (well, OK, > less if you count from when the project started). > Let's not let a desire for excellent prevent the useful... Sure but I prefer slow than sloppy. Getting the previews working and doing monthly releases are not the same thing. > What's needed to get font previews on the OLFB site in, say, the > next week or so? Who can help with it? What skills are needed? > > Liam > -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] A preview of the fonts on OFL (includes a backup of nearly all fonts and a way to download them)
> Also, would anyone want to take on this task to help do monthly > release of the fonts? > > Setting up a cronjob is a nice way to keep it always happening, and > save like the last 30 days of files at a time in the package, then > just take the 1st of the month and make a new package! I hate to rain on this parade but seriously, I don't think this is such a good idea at all! I doubt your automatically produced deb or rpm is up to the standards to become part of a distro archive. It will create problems with existing open font packages and duplication pains. Not cool. Also the OFLB shouldn't be doing big releases of a big pile of very different things, each font is released separately by their author on the OFLB, we should respect that. I recommend focusing on the remaining integration tasks and the font audit. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] A preview of the fonts on OFL (includes a backup of nearly all fonts and a way to download them)
> Nicholas, do we have a package of our fonts? Some of the quality open fonts published on the OFLB are already packaged by the distro team in Debian/Fedora in their own package. Packaging and the corresponding review and checking procedure is really best left to distro teams and their members as it fits the best packaging procedures and requirements for maintainership. You will never use all the fonts together, putting the quality ones without legal problems into a gigantic package doesn't make sense... We need to fight against the stockpiling syndrome of getting as many fonts as possible downloaded and only a few actually used. IMHO you are make too much of a parallel with the specifics of the community and the content approach of the Open Clipart Library. We're not doing nor aiming to do the same thing with OFLB. BTW newer versions of GNOME and KDE allow you to install fonts in the font folders directly: There's also this simple nautilus script: http://utilities.open-fonts.org/Install_fonts There's also http://fontmatrix.net/ and http://code.google.com/p/font-manager/ Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] A preview of the fonts on OFL (includes a backup of nearly all fonts and a way to download them)
[...] > I also wonder, what are the chances of adding a tool into OFL to create > previews of all font files and then adding the previews to the browse > and font pages? > > Best regards > > Iwan Thanks for your efforts in providing previews. The tools which Ed Trager has worked on for the OFLB (pango-cairo-font-playground) provide support for generating previews beyond what "convert" from imagemagick currently allows us to do. Should allow us to get rid of the questions marks and empty boxes... :-) So integrated previewing is underway and will be available on the live site hopefully soon. BTW, OFL is the license and OFLB is the library :-) People who are yet not aware of it may also be interested by the review we run weekly for all the fonts in Debian: various metadata fields and to-be-improved previewing too: http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/review/ Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] open Slab Serifs
> Hallo all, > > I'm hardly looking for Open Slab Serifs fonts > with some weight if possible :> > > OSP_HelveticaSerif is not yet ready > > Many thanks > Ludi > > Ludivine Loiseau > . > O S P > http://ospublish.constantvzw.org Hello Ludivine, Not quite sure what you have in mind with open slab serifs (Egyptiennes, Mécanes?) but maybe this will help: http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/fonts/tag/slab-serif http://www.nuevostudio.com/project/tiza/ http://openfontlibrary.org/media/files/gluk/306 I'll let others chime in with suggestions. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] epic fail: French Anti-Piracy Organisation Hadopi Uses Pirated Font In Own Logo
Chris Lilley wrote: > Hello, > > An object lesson in being sure that fonts are used within the terms > of their license. The design agency for Hadopi, the French agency > overseeing the controversial 'three strikes' law that removes > Internet access from households after three illegal download > warnings, itself used a copy of an exclusive corporate typeface > design made for France Telecom, stolen copies of which have appeared > on warez sites. (The other font used was also unlicensed, but is at > least *available* for licensing, and a copy was purchased some two > months after the logo went into use). > > http://fontfeed.com/archives/french-anti-piracy-organisation-uses-pirated-font-in-ownlogo/ Hi Chris, Oh the delicious irony... I also really hope the buzz around this will result in more people becoming aware of the need to always respect the upstream designer's license whatever it may be: libre/open or more restricted as an exclusivity for a particular entity. Never assume but make an effort to look at the metadata. More details on the font family itself: http://www.typofonderie.com/alphabets/view/Bienvenue/?lang=en and the upstream designers: http://www.typofonderie.com/profile BTW, glad to see that the W3C discussions around fonts have led to a recognition of the need for metadata: DRE instead of DRM. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Fwd: PT Sans licensing query
Dave Crossland wrote: > Hi, > > Thoughts? > > I think this is okay and worth encouraging; does anyone have any other > suggestions for me to pass on to Emil? :-) I see the ongoing discussion with them as an encouraging sign of goodwill from a major and prestigious foundry :-) It's great to see them considering more open terms for some of the their fonts and mentioning that some of their clients like the idea but let's not rush over the important details (there are also some bugs and ambiguities in their proposed draft too). I'll be replying to Emil Yakupov shortly. As indicated earlier, we certainly don't want to encourage further fragmentation of the existing licensing spectrum for libre/open fonts. We really need to make the case that a duplicative and non-reusable font family-specific license is NOT A GOOD IDEA. The last thing we need are all the well-meaning foundries cooking up their own OFL-like quasi libre license for each of the fonts they want to release for redistribution and modification. That will really cause confusion for users and designers, unnecessary silos for font software and community pain more than anything else :-( All licensing authors and stewards have a clear policy of not approving or validating translations of licenses which could cause huge problems and open the door to abuse but instead have a policy of encouraging unofficial translations of the license and the corresponding documentation alongside the original. For example for the GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLTranslations and for the OFL: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL#0b8d92bc I need to point out that Russia is signatory to the international copyright treaties and while providing a clear Russian unofficial translation of a license + FAQ is very useful for understanding, I doubt that they strictly reject software licenses not written in Russian. That would keep away a huge amount of software. Remember we are not talking about contracts and contract laws but about author's copyrights and global copyright law based on the international treaties. Of course every author/foundry is entitled to release their creation under their own terms whatever that may be, but it they want to release for modification and redistribution to the FLOSS community and reap the benefits, we have a responsibility to encourage them to do it in the best way possible: one that benefits them and doesn't create a mess in our community... > -- Forwarded message -- > From: Yakupov, Emil Date: 2010/1/7 > Subject: RE: PT Sans licensing query > To: Dave Crossland > > Hi Dave, > Hope you enjoy you tour in New Zealand. I also just come back from > skiing in Bulgaria. > > Returning to our licensing question. When I told about my concern I > meant not only possible future changes on OFL, but mostly possible > changes in our minds. First of all -- we are going to distribute the > fonts via Microsoft. I'm asking MS to consider possibility to include > the fonts into one of the next recommended updates and I'm not sure > that they will agree to bundle the font with OFL which is not > modifiable. We also think about other similar channels and while some > of them like to have exactly OFL, I can imagine that some of them who > offer commercial software will not. > And also you are right Russian-English aspect is the main and the most > critical. In any case we need to present the License that fully > corresponds in terms and statements to Russian federal low in the area > of protection of intellectual property -- Chapter 4 of the The Civil > Code. > > I think that the best and most flexible way will be the following. > We place on our site, on the site of Federal Agency and on the sites > of local governments of Russian Federation the distributive set that > is bundled with Russian license that will play the role of main EULA > together with supplementary English version which will serve > information purposes. > I place the draft English version below for you information. > > At the same time, if you agree, we will write on our site that the > fonts are also available under SIL OFL and those who would like to > bundle the fonts with for example Linux systems may get the OFL > version of the font by a special request. OFL version will have the > link to http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_web. > > Best Regards > Emil Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OFLB file uploading fixed
Jon Phillips wrote: > Ok, I added the fix from OCAL and now file/font uploading works on the > live open font library again...so embarrassing, but fix in place! Thanks for the fix, Jon! > Please upload fonts!!! Looks like it's flowing again: among other goodies, an open font interestingly called "Grana Padano" was uploaded by Daniel_J Yummy Italian cheese :-) > Jon Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OneClickOrgs beta - our environment is now ready
Ben Weiner wrote: > Hi, > > On 8 Dec 2009, at 11:47, Nicolas Spalinger wrote: > >> If it's the "Open" Font Library, I really think it should be reflected >> in our objectives a bit more clearly. >> >> I feel that the OFLB is more of a catalog and a meta open-foundry with >> useful utilities and documentation helping people find and use quality >> open fonts on the web. Our advocacy should really be action-based. IMHO >> focusing the scope will help us move forward. Always harder to be >> everything to everyone. > > Agree. Great :-) >> How about instead: >> >> "To catalogue, host and sponsor the creation and availability of quality >> libre/open fonts (typeface designs software expressions) for the web." > > > Do you mean "typeface designs and their software expressions"? I want to make it clear that that libre/open fonts are the software expressions of a typeface design. So no "and" but a parenthesis of explanation. Improved wording welcome. But that's what I strongly feel needs to be said. I want to make the software status of fonts clearer: typeface design = creative concept = idea fonts = software expression of the design = copyrightable work We will be accepting and publishing fonts not the "idea" of them, won't we? Let's make this terminology clear. Otherwise I feel we seriously risk abusing the trust of uploaders, who may easily be ripped off by those who believe (and there are an increasing number) that ideas shouldn't be bound by copyright law only their actual implementations. Especially as this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. This isn't our goal, right? We had a thread earlier called "Site terminology: Fonts/Typefaces" where I made the case after LGM discussions on the subject: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/2009-May/002132.html > Cheers, > Ben > > Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html > +44 (0) 7780 608 659 Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OneClickOrgs beta - our environment is now ready
Dave Crossland wrote: > 2009/12/3 Nicolas Spalinger : >> This effort may well help the OFLB move forward. Getting the core team >> together and providing clearer ways for others to contribute can only be >> useful. I like the idea of an AGPL tool dedicated to help with this. >> Let's see what it can bring to our community. > > :-) > >> I confirm that I intend to continue working with the OFLB and will >> attend/contribute to the next LGM in Brussels. The initial core team >> looks good to me (considering past contributions). > > Thanks :-) And thanks for your many efforts too! >> But what form will this proposed structure take in practise? >> We need to define and finalize a charter/constitution, set up clear >> community policies along with establishing non-profit/for-profit >> equilibrium and the necessary funding transparency... I will send more >> thoughts on this soon. > > I believe that is what the application will help us do - so far it has > asked me to state the 6 'core team' names and emails, and enter "The > organisation's objectives" for which I wrote: > > "To distribute, develop, and promote the development of, free (libre) > fonts and typeface designs." If it's the "Open" Font Library, I really think it should be reflected in our objectives a bit more clearly. I feel that the OFLB is more of a catalog and a meta open-foundry with useful utilities and documentation helping people find and use quality open fonts on the web. Our advocacy should really be action-based. IMHO focusing the scope will help us move forward. Always harder to be everything to everyone. How about instead: "To catalogue, host and sponsor the creation and availability of quality libre/open fonts (typeface designs software expressions) for the web." > Also I checked "yes" box on "The organisation will have the power to > hold and transfer assets" OK. I for one vote for our "constitution" to articulate community and business relationships as clearly as we can. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OneClickOrgs beta - our environment is now ready
Dave Crossland wrote: > Hi! > > Okay, I have been in contact with the good people at > http://www.oneclickor.gs/ about getting a light weight legal structure > set up for OFLB, and they are ready to take us on :-) > > To do this I need 5 people willing to be 'core members' who will sit > on the board of the group, and who will be at the LGM2010 in May next > year to have a face to face meeting. > > I'm guessing this would be: > > Ben Weiner > Ed Trager > Nicolas Spalinger > Jon Phillips > Alexandre Prokoudine > > When we agree on this, I'll put in the names and email details of the > founding members of the legal organisation, an agenda will be created > that allows for a meeting to occur in the real world. Once that > meeting has been held on the agreed date, I will then go back to the > website and finish off the founding of the official organisation. Hi Dave and other OFLB-ers, This effort may well help the OFLB move forward. Getting the core team together and providing clearer ways for others to contribute can only be useful. I like the idea of an AGPL tool dedicated to help with this. Let's see what it can bring to our community. I confirm that I intend to continue working with the OFLB and will attend/contribute to the next LGM in Brussels. The initial core team looks good to me (considering past contributions). But what form will this proposed structure take in practise? We need to define and finalize a charter/constitution, set up clear community policies along with establishing non-profit/for-profit equilibrium and the necessary funding transparency... I will send more thoughts on this soon. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] latest?
> And something does need to be done, since OFL forbids conversion to > another format without a rename fork; which is a PITA for folks who > want to reference a WOFF version of a free font. OLF-ed fonts are libre/open fonts not "free fonts". And no, I'm not tired of insisting on the crucial difference and will clarify each time there is a need. We refuse the semantics game of some "professional" foundries who lump under the "free font" blanket term the freeware low quality stuff of unknown or dubious legal origin with quality open fonts using FSF-approved licenses. NOT the same approach! This is actually a design feature of the OFL which is wanted and recognized as useful by many actual real font designers: allowing unrestricted modifications and branching while not messing up the namespace and confusing end-users. Not likely to change. What's keeping webmasters from showing a little creativity in finding a new name for their branch? Seriously, it's not that hard, really. Font optimizer services like http://fonts.philip.html5.org/ already take that fact into account and handle the renaming when they generate a branch. If they absolutely need to keep the upstream name they can directly negotiate with upstream for permissions. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] latest?
Dave Crossland wrote: > Hi, > > I am blocking progress, and I apologise totally, since I am letting the > whole project down, but sadly I have had girlfriend drama and > responsibilities to my family I have to take care of over the summer and > haven't been at a computer much. Hi Dave, Hope all will get better soon :-) For the OFLB launch, better to do things right and slowly than in a rush... > Basically I need to do a documented install of cchost on the testvm, > install the oflb theme and ed's tools, and migrate the fonts from v1. And the licensing audit as part of the migration. Let us know how we can help. I think we also seriously need to think about WOFF support in the library seeing the endorsement already expressed by many organizations: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/10/20/mozilla-supports-web-open-font-format/ > Regards, Dave Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Downtime / What to do about it??
> I happen to be feeling a bit frustrated with the openfontlibrary.org > downtime. > > I'm considering frame forwarding openfontlibrary.net to > http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org, but I don't really want to pull the DNS > off OSUOSL if > OSUOSL is going to do something about making http://www.openfontlibrary.net > work as a backup as would have hoped it would have during > openfontlibrary.org > downtime. > > I HAVE NOW put up a new status message containing a link to > http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org > on http://www.openfontlibrary.com so that people fumbling around by domain > looking for openfontlibrary can at least find the beta site while the main > site is down. And we're frustrated by your repeated trolling around our project. Your "rebellious" project is suddenly worried that upstream OFLB has temporary hosting problems? And you start using "we" as if you would somehow represent active contributors instead of just your dubious fork attempt. What's going on here? This doesn't make a lot of sense. What is the goal you're pursuing here exactly? How about revealing your identity and ulterior motive instead of wasting our time? You're free to do whatever you want but don't associate yourself with the Open Font Library. BTW, your page is hosted in a datacenter in Seattle, what affiliation are you trying to hide? Don't feed the anonymous troll... -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Heuristica 0.2
Daniel Glassey wrote: > 2009/8/20 Andrey V. Panov : >> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 08:55:19PM +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: >>> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Nicolas Spalinger wrote: >>> >>>> No you just have to be a git expert, which is much easier isn't it: >>>> git clone git://ctrl.tukaani.org/xz.git >>>> >>>> You can grab and build the tarballs from the packages.foo.org pages >>>> (right-hand menu) or on the upstream website... >>>> Or motivate maintainers for your preferred environment... >>> Incidentally, XZ sounds very much like Russian ХЗ acronym which can be >>> roughly translated as "hell knows" meaning "How do I know?" :) I'm >>> wondering if Andrey realized that :) >>> >>> Alexandre >> No. Xz format is becoming the leading format for compression for Linux >> binary packages. Slackware already switched to it, Red Hat is going to >> do this in its rpm format. You may also install 7zip 9.x to unpack this. > > Leading? And it's the first time Alexandre and I (and I would guess > lots of others) have heard of it. How do you expect users on older > OS's to unpack it? Or do you just not want them to see the font? Why > not have a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 as well as this new format? If it is > going to be packaged for Debian/Ubuntu it will need to be repacked > anyway. > > I see that most of the other files in that directory are .bz2 so I > can't see that being a problem. > > Aside from that, good work on the fonts :) Yes, indeed! We somehow got sidetracked by the format issue, so I'll join Daniel in saying thanks again to you Andrey for all the design work and for releasing it widely :-) > Regards, > Daniel Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Heuristica 0.2
Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 6:11 PM, Nicolas Spalinger wrote: > >>>> Link to download: ftp://ftp.dvo.ru/pub/Font/heuristica/ >>> .tar.xz? What on Earth is that? >> AFAICT it's an improved compression format: >> http://tukaani.org/xz/ >> >> Look for xz-utils: >> http://packages.debian.org/experimental/xz-utils >> http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/xz-utils > > So we have to be using most recent unstable Ubuntu to be able to open > the files now? :) Ha, ha ha, nice one :-) No you just have to be a git expert, which is much easier isn't it: git clone git://ctrl.tukaani.org/xz.git You can grab and build the tarballs from the packages.foo.org pages (right-hand menu) or on the upstream website... Or motivate maintainers for your preferred environment... > Alexandre -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Heuristica 0.2
Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Andrey V. > Panov wrote: >> The second beta version of Heuristica fonts is released. This version adds >> kerning for Cyrillic, adds more Cyrillic and other characters (e.g. "Euro"). >> >> Link to download: ftp://ftp.dvo.ru/pub/Font/heuristica/ > > .tar.xz? What on Earth is that? AFAICT it's an improved compression format: http://tukaani.org/xz/ Look for xz-utils: http://packages.debian.org/experimental/xz-utils http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/xz-utils > Alexandre -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Fwd: www-font: WebOTF Proposal
Ben Weiner wrote: > Hi there, > > With Nicolas Spalinger's comments about font metadata (13:00 BST today) > fresh in my mind, I want to ask what the open font community thinks > about this proposal. As I understand it, this proposal is intended to > *replace* OTF/TTF font linking. Unlike another proposal, it does not > allow any kind of backward compatibility with any version of 'EOT', > Microsoft's system for font linking in Internet Explorer from version 4 > upwards. At a quick glance this seems like a very nice proposal with a lot more consensus from the various stakeholders. Thanks to the authors for their efforts. A rather good sign that the debate is maturing, IMHO. (Probably not intended as a replacement to direct TTF/OTF usage in UAs already implementing that, though). My concern would be that some key extended metadata fields which are encouraged to be treated by the UA as the primary source of information about the font remain optional: - MAY have license text and/or URL to licensing info. - MAY have copyright text. - MAY have trademark text. These should really be switched to "MUST". I don't see why you would want to distribute a font where this information is not present. If fallback on the TTF/OTF name table entries is then used, why not make sure to populate the extended metadata fields in the first place? Whatever licensing model you choose, then declare it clearly! The days of simply saying "please review the license agreement you received with this font software" of similar vague blanket statement are over. I think users and designers who remix want to know. Some of the extra metadata fields could map nicely with what we already have in the FONTLOGs. Presumably the font design toolkit will include utilities to compare/sync between fields in ttf NAME table/extended metadata/FONTLOG. Putting all the fine technical details aside: an approach were clear metadata is easily filled in by authors and nicely exposed in the DOM and somewhere non-intrusive in the UI of the browsers is the way forward. Everybody benefits. > If you need the 'history' of this proposal and others, it is all on the > w3c's www-font list. > > Ben Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Verbose license text in a font
Dave Crossland wrote: > Its not common but for free fonts it is more common. Well, "free fonts" can really do whatever they want... Proper metadata usage will surely increase. OTOH many libre/open fonts projects already follow metadata best practises and they are active distro team like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/etc who analyse metadata of published releases and kindly report bugs to upstream authors so they can be fixed. And of course there's the great work of Ed on fontaine and the OFLB's plans for making good use of metadata :-) Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Verbose license text in a font
Chris Lilley wrote: > Hello , > > Seen on www-font recently: > >> Gentium won't work in IE8/Win 7 due to a regression bug in the >> t2embed library; as part of a Windows security patch the decision >> was made to not load fonts with more than 5K in a name table record, >> which includes fonts like Gentium which includes the entire Open >> Font License text in the license name record. > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-font/2009JulSep/1209.html > > Is it common for license text to be included in a font (rather than a > link to the license)? Yes, this is the case for the vast majority of open fonts. The OT spec provides both License and License_URL fields in the name table for this purpose and all authors should take advantage of it. One for the license itself and one for a URL pointing to the upstream license page (which is increasingly exposed to the user and clickable BTW). Recommended best practises in the open font community are to indicate licensing terms very clearly and not rely on some vague reference. The licensing metadata should really travel with the item itself for maximum clarity. (An external copyright notice and FONTLOG is also recommended). I don't see why any Windows limitation should change that. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Contribute logos for permissive font licenses on OFLBv2
Dave Crossland wrote: > Full acronyms as text next to the icon is good, but again, I think > you're putting too much weight on what is surely a very minor part of > the page. With tooltips I wouldn't expect anyone to confuse the MIT > license with the M+ license which we don't support and I have never > heard of :) I see your point and you can probably understand where I'm coming from on this but licensing clarity is really a major feature of the whole library. This might be a small illustration, and we already have full reports on the page of the font itself but seeing as clearly as possible what rights are granted or reserved right there in the list of fonts is also needed. We care about good licensing and about not hiding it to users/contributors of the site, it's part of what makes this service stand out compared to existing font portals. Especially as the webfonts debate matures and recognizes the value of showing the right metadata to users... There are at least 4 well-known and widely used licenses starting with G... -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Contribute logos for permissive font licenses on OFLBv2
> I'm sure sure a letter guessing game is really all that useful as DRE > (Digital Right Expression) :-) Err, I meant "I'm not sure". -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Contribute logos for permissive font licenses on OFLBv2
Robert Martinez wrote: > Dave Crossland wrote: >> 2009/7/30 Robert Martinez : >> >>> I'm not really happy with that much text inside a tiny image. >>> >> >> I agree. How about just the first letter? >> >> G M O >> > Works better imho! > We just have to make sure to add mouse-over information with full names > and link to a page that explains all licences in more detail and with > proper logo. Thanks for the efforts on this. It looks good but is rather confusing IMHO for people who haven't heard of these licenses before... I agree that tooltips and links are needed. If we loose the word "License" then we have space for the full acronyms. Much more understandable like that I think. For example the "M" license can be confused with the M+ license http://mplus-fonts.sourceforge.jp/mplus-outline-fonts/ (project-specific license). Various other licenses start with letters O M G. I'm sure sure a letter guessing game is really all that useful as DRE (Digital Right Expression) :-) The book looks relatively thick to me: our licenses are not so long (well apart from the GPL maybe but rightfully so...), what about something which looks more like a one-page document and the acronyms overlaid slightly on the side? Maybe the Tango or GNOME icons can provide some inspiration: http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Library http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Text-x-generic.svg HTH, Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] MIT Logo
Dave Crossland wrote: > 2009/7/30 Joshua A.C. Newman : >> Sure. >> Are these all the licenses available, though? I didn't understand the >> outcome of the earlier thread. > > I think it is safe to say: We all agree we will focus on these licenses for > now. Good to hear that. And everytime the subject comes back somehow, I be will among the ones advocating against the OFLB fragmenting the community by promoting a gazillion other non-community-approved non-reusable licenses :-) Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Contribute logos for permissive font licenses on OFLBv2
Dave Crossland wrote: > 2009/7/30 Robert Martinez : >> Apart from that only a MIT and a GPL version are required - right? >> I can work on those icons this evening. > > Those 3 licenses are our 'recommended' or 'core' ones, and I think > that if we host other licensed fonts (again, I forget where we are on > that) they could just have a 'generic free' license icon. So if you > can work on 3 icons (that I might keyword as GPL, BSD, FREE) that > would be great :-) Why the mixup of license policy again? We really need to avoid confusing contributors. See the previous thread where this was discussed: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/2009-July/002381.html We really need to use official logos of our licenses. Get in touch with the authors of MIT for that one. The GPLv3 + FE logo needs to be different from standard http://www.gnu.org/graphics/license-logos.html for clarity. Seriously, what will "a generic free" keyword/icon blanket category bring apart from confusion about what "free" means? -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Need: Publicity Partner for openfonlibrary.com, the anti-copyleft anti sil ofl
Dave Crossland wrote: > lulz Ha ha ha. Allow me to translate what our anonymous troll is trying to say: "I now have my first untraceable henchman in a great army of leechers, please, please, please help me and gimme more!!! I'm still rather confused though..." Move along, nothing to see here... -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] What licenses do we accept?
Ed Trager wrote: > Hi, Nicolas (Mailhot), > >> Vollkorn >> http://www.grafikfritze.de/?p=43 > > This appears to be a very nice font. The web page says its under a CC > license -- but which one? > > In any case, the License field within the font itself only says > "Copyright (c) FRiTZe, 2006. All rights reserved." So Fontaine can > only conclude "Unknown or Proprietary License"! > > Does anyone know this font author? Perhaps someone could write to > him, suggesting he fill in the Copyright/License fields directly in > the font file itself. Also, we really need to know very specifically > which CC license. "CC" by itself is almost useless, I think (I could > be wrong ...) No you're entirely right, this is the kind of ambiguity we need to filter out in a friendly manner to keep our quality focus. The various combinations have very different effects. The FSF also indicates directly on their license-lists that this is a crucial issue: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#which-cc But on this font author's page there are two links to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/de/ only attribution (and German jurisdiction). BTW, the name reminds me of Dennis's Vollkornnudeln font: http://home.sus.mcgill.ca/~moyogo/fonts/Vollkornnudeln.ttf > Best - Ed -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] What licenses do we accept?
> I meant "deprecated" as in project-.org-specific and not neutral and > reusable like MIT/OFL/GPLv2+FE. Hum, I really meant GPLv3 there. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] What licenses do we accept?
Ed Trager wrote: > Hi, Nicolas, > > (1) I'll work on chasing down the deprecated licenses you mention. > This is straightforward to do. Great. I meant "deprecated" as in project-.org-specific and not neutral and reusable like MIT/OFL/GPLv2+FE. This may save you some time: http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/review/debian-font-review.txt https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal_considerations_for_fonts#Approved_font_licenses > (2) The CC Licenses are actually the ones that I find most confusing > ... Could someone provide me the names and links to actual fonts > licensed under CC licenses so I can see what the authors have included > in the Copyright and License fields? Apparently you need to register to look at any font on fontstruct. But I suspect you can match on the creativecommons.org URL as a start. > - Ed -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] What licenses do we accept?
Ed Trager wrote: > Hi, all, > > In reply to Dave's question, under the "src/licenses" subdirectory in > Fontaine's code tree we find: > > ~/fontaine/trunk/src/licenses $ ls > > Aladdin.hGPL.h licenses.h template.h > ArphicPublic.h GPLWithFontException.h Magenta.h UnknownLicense.h > BitstreamVera.h IPA.h OFL.h > Freeware.h LGPL.h PublicDomain.h Hi Ed, In the project-and-organisation-specific deprecated category we may want to add detection for the following licensing models: - Utopia - Baekmuk - GUST - Hershey - Lucida - Stix - Wadalab - mplus - Mincho And a profile to detect any CC-licensed fonts to flag them up. > "template.h" provides a template for extending Fontaine to recognize > additional licenses. I'll provide the patch for MIT. > Best - Ed Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] What licenses do we accept?
> Since there are now many CC-BY or BY-SA fonts, should we accept these too? Many? I strongly recommend we tell people using CC combinations to use font-specific licenses for their font software. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] What licenses do we accept?
> I believe it should be Public Domain, CC-Zero, OFL, and > GPLv3-orLater+FE, but I forget if we reached a consensus when this was > discussed previously. The consensus we had reached was that we'd focus on font-specific licenses and limit the library to only: MIT, OFL and GPLv3+font-exception we offer a easy to understand spectrum of: - MIT: attribution-only non-copyleft permits: Distribution, Reproduction, DerivativeWorks requires: Attribution, Notice - OFL: copyleft + community-validated font-specific mechanisms permits: Distribution, Reproduction, Embedding, DerivativeWorks requires: Attribution, Notice, ShareAlike, DerivativeRenaming, BundlingWhenSelling - GPLv3+font-exception: copyleft + font-source requirements (and still a bunch of things to be fixed... and more community input) permits: Distribution, Reproduction, Embedding, DerivativeWorks requires: Attribution, Notice, ShareAlike, ExtendedSourcesFullRedistribution ... (some requirements may disappear downstream) The troubles with "public domain" (grey areas with the definition and legit traceability issues for example) have been discussed at length already and CC combinations are designed for content and not software: http://jay.tuley.name/archives/2006/03/27/5-reasons-not-to-choose-a-Creative-Commons-license-for-code 3 models to choose from is already more than enough. Most of the community has chosen the middle of the spectrum already... Too many licenses fragment our community. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Firefox 3.5 is out!
Dave Crossland wrote: > 2009/7/1 ricardo lafuente : >> would it be too difficult/impractical to have this run on a font submitted >> to the OFLB and generate the .eot on demand? > > That's the plan; actually, the ideal plan would be to have a mod_eot > Apache module so that when it saw IE coming, it did a cached > conversion on the fly so web designers don't have to think about it. I really recommend focusing on the remaining taks to handle the native formats first. Always harder to be everything to everyone all the time... :-( And to respect the licensing chosen by the authors releasing on OFLB under the OFL we need to take into account the fact that any format conversion is not lossless and is creating a Modified Version which should be named in such a way that it doesn't mess up the namespace: by respecting the reserved font names defined by the authors. So any subsetting and conversion process will need to handle the renaming gracefully: Foo Sans -> Subsetted Bar >> i can see the issue in providing files in (another) closed format though. On >> the other hand, it would eliminate that significant hurdle (IE support) and >> allow for a statement that fonts in OFLB are cross-browser compatible. Long >> shot? > > The conversion software is GPL, so the format isn't closed; its patent > encumbered in the USA, but, we discussed that and decided it didn't > matter. Well, may I ask when did this discussion take place and with whom? Do we really have the time/energy for a patent war? I remember statements from Mozilla employees that Firefox will never implement EOT because of how patent patent-ladden elements can't be implemented under the GPL. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Font subsets
James Weiner wrote: > Hi people, > > I was wondering if anyone had a suggestion for where I can get hold of a > suggestion for a 'minimum useful' character set? > > I am optimising some typefaces for @font-face use (they are currently > ~350Kb) and I would prefer them to way in around 50-75Kb at most, but I > also want them to be actually useful. > > For now the site the subsetted fonts are for is only in English, > although it may be internationalised in the coming years. > > Any suggestions appreciated. You're right: optimisation is a tradeoff: one man's bloat is another man's absolute survival minimum :-) As Nicolas M. has indicated the MES-x subsets are probably a good start. Also please take into account any reserved font names requirements when doing the subsetting. > Cheers, James Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Hevetice Neue on the OpenFont site
[...] > So, what license are you using for it? > -Joshua I also wonder if there is a particular reason your metadata is so minimal. I do realise metadata can be an afterthought when focusing on the design but why not declare which rights you choose to give/reserve (up to you to decide) since you're publishing a version of your ongoing work on a public URL? Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
[OpenFontLibrary] src:local
> and its a discussion with Aaron Spaulding about his Javascript work on > the http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/files/ listing Quick comment (I still need to listen to the recording): Isn't it src: local (Foo) instead of src: local (Foo.ttf) ? We should drop the extension in the snippets. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Firefox 3.5 showing off @font-face prominently
Dave Crossland wrote: > Hi, > > Just upgraded my Firefox to the 3.5 prerelease, and its welcome page > is http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5/whatsnew/ which uses > a comic font loaded via > http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/style/tignish/firstrun-3-5-rc1.css but > which I can't track down the developers of. Its available from > http://www.dafont.com/Laffayette-Comic-Pro.font but I see no clear > copyright license :( I can find: http://www.de.free-fonts.biz/Laffayette_Comic_Pro.ttf.download.html freeware with modification and commercial use restrictions apparently. I agree that we need to coordinate with the Mozilla folks about showing off a font from our library in their release welcome page :-) Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] [CREATE] LGM 2010 - Vote on proposal
Louis Desjardins wrote: > Hi, > > Several location were mentioned for LGM 2010, but only one has lead to a > formal proposition. > > After the few mails we have read on this list, we now propose that we > have a vote if we accept it or not. > > LGM would take place in Brussels, May 6-9 2010, hosted by the local > non-profit organisation Constant, represented by Femke Snelting. > > The details of this proposal and the discussions around it have all been > posted on the Create Mailing List. > > So, before announcing this officially, we need a clear support from the > LGM participating teams. You are the heart of LGM! :) Hi Louis and everyone, I also fully support the Brussels proposal! Go OSP team -:) Looking forward to what will be concocted... Brussels sounds like a great place for more open font community people to meet/hack/draw/learn and move the various projects forward. Cc-ed to the OFLB list. > Your dedicated LGM organisers would like to move forward asap with an > enthusiastic support on the decision. Please speak up now! :) > > Cheers! > > Louis > > -- > Louis Desjardins > Organisateur principal / Main organiser > Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 - Montréal 6-9 mai 2009 > www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2009 <http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2009> > +1 514 994 9351 (cell phone) > +1 514 934 1353 (office phone) > HAE / EDT GMT -5 -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] theleagueofmoveabletype.com is switching to the Open Font License
>> which reminds me, it would be nice to have a document with a good set of >> arguments clearing out that the OFL doesn't mean people will be able to >> 'steal' your stuff any more than a proprietary license (it will actually >> make you more friends :) > > As NS already mentioned, he and I and Ed (and others, I forget) worked > on a ODT/PDF "Go For OFL!" letter which got permission from various > orgs to use their logo to lend credibility to the letter. > >> if anyone's also up for it, i'd be interested in group-drafting a FAQ of >> sorts for designers who might be reluctant to step towards libre licensing >> of their work, clearing up common misunderstandings and allaying some fears >> they might have regarding that. > > Jump into the wiki :-) OK, I put some notes I had lying around about this in our wiki: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/DesignersPerspectiveOpenFonts Food for thought and a basis for your advocacy resources to designers I hope :-) >> do you think building up this kind of traditional-designer-oriented >> argumentary makes sense? > > Totally :-) Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] theleagueofmoveabletype.com is switching to the Open Font License
ricardo lafuente wrote: > Nicolas Spalinger wrote: >> [...] >> Can I suggest extending/completing/adjusting the following resources: >> http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web >> http://unifont.org/go_for_ofl/downloads/OFLCampaignLetterTemplate.odt >> > > With pleasure! I'll look those over during the weekend. > >> There are good thoughts about this in our wiki too. >> >> Also, Victor Gaultney and Denis Jacquerye's talks at AtypI conferences >> made very good points to the question "what's in it for me as a designer >> in doing open fonts?" >> > > Thank you for pointing the way! After i sent the last e-mail i realised > i am not really acquainted with the documentation/advocacy work done > already, so i'll take some time to see and read what's already there. :-) No worries, IMHO your perspective and existing contacts with the type community (like robothon and so on) will be extremely useful in refining our existing advocacy resources. Thanks in advance! > ricardo -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] theleagueofmoveabletype.com is switching to the Open Font License
[...] A quick note (I need focus to focus on other projects today): > which reminds me, it would be nice to have a document with a good set of > arguments clearing out that the OFL doesn't mean people will be able to > 'steal' your stuff any more than a proprietary license (it will actually > make you more friends :) > > if anyone's also up for it, i'd be interested in group-drafting a FAQ of > sorts for designers who might be reluctant to step towards libre > licensing of their work, clearing up common misunderstandings and > allaying some fears they might have regarding that. And then we could > get in touch with them, especially given that there's an expert PR > person on the boat (go Dave :o) > > out of my head, a few arguments: > * your work will be credited > * it would get much more visibility and respect than what the 'free > font' websites give > * anyone who would steal or hijack an open font would do the same if it > was freeware (or even proprietary, given that you can find 90% of > commercial fonts on p2p -- not a safe argument but still) > * a good metaphor for being open is sharing your lunch and making > friends, not opening your house to burglars (this one is *way* too > common among designers, in my experience) > * and so on. > > do you think building up this kind of traditional-designer-oriented > argumentary makes sense? I think it's another excellent idea to help with advocacy. It's always up to the authors to choose but we can make surely the case :-) Your perspective as a designer doing advocacy to designers is VERY welcome. I'd say that designers have quite a few things to teach the FLOSS community actually :-) Can I suggest extending/completing/adjusting the following resources: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web http://unifont.org/go_for_ofl/downloads/OFLCampaignLetterTemplate.odt There are good thoughts about this in our wiki too. Also, Victor Gaultney and Denis Jacquerye's talks at AtypI conferences made very good points to the question "what's in it for me as a designer in doing open fonts?" Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] theleagueofmoveabletype.com is switching to the Open Font License
Dave Crossland wrote: > Happy days :-) Yeah! Great news. Thanks for the advocacy efforts Dave! > -- Forwarded message -- > From: The League of Moveable Type > Date: 2009/6/4 > Subject: Re: Please consider switching to the Open Font License > To: Dave Crossland > > Hello Dave, > > Caroline here, thanks for getting in touch. Actually, we are thinking > of switching to the SIL Open Font License, it's just a matter of > letting know our font contributors about the change. We agree, we > think the Open Font License will work better for the purposes of The > League. So we'll let you know when we've made the change. > > And thanks for the heads up! > -Caroline > > The League of Moveable Type > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] AdBard?
Dave Crossland wrote:
> Hi,
>
> How do people feel about AdBard adverts of the OFLB site to raise
> money for development?
Well, I'd personally much rather see resources coming from another round
of funding by interested patrons like we discussed earlier and setting
up a goodies (t-shirts, etc) store.
I'm a bit worried about some ads reflecting badly on our community
goals ("A gazillion free fonts here" link) but the network of ads seem
to be FLOSS oriented. I guess it depends which ads come through and how
intrusive or not it is in the final design...
Also, is putting ads in line with the hosting and acceptable use policy
of our host @ the University of Oregon?
While we're on that subject I'd say it's useful to be as transparent as
possible about the way money interacts with our community: source of
funds and recipients while also recognizing the crucial non-commercial
contributions.
A fund for travels/meetups would be very useful too. Some of our core
OFLB community members wanted to go to LGM to talk about fonts and
interact with the others but sadly couldn't.
Cheers,
--
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org
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Re: [OpenFontLibrary] CC Attribution Share Alike Licence & fonts
ricardo lafuente wrote: > Nicolas Spalinger wrote: >> I would say no: because of the major issue that Creative Commons >> licenses are designed and used for content and not software. >> >> CC strongly discourages using a CC combination for software: >> http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F >> >> >> IMHO we don't want to add extra confusion to the choice of licenses. >> > > This is a point that the whole hype around Creative Commons made a lot > less visible than necessary. > > Their choice is probably due to some confusion regarding font licensing, > like you say -- they seem to come from the design world, and after years > of seeing commercial licenses, it's fitting that you run for the first > airhole you'd see when you want to 'go open-source' and escape from the > proprietary logic. > > I'm pretty sure that they'd change their terms if someone would approach > them and point the caveats like you just did. It looks like a good > opportunity to get in touch with designers (who come from the other side > of the fence, in a way), and a great way for OFLB and the OFL to gain > visibility, maybe? Hi Ricardo, You make an excellent point :-) Is anyone already in contact with them and could ping them about this issue in a friendly way? We could imagine a wiki entry of people we'd like to contact and point out/discuss licensing issues with, what do you think? They'd probably listen to fellow designers :-) > Also -- after Ellen Lupton's release and advocacy of the Free Font > Manifesto* (http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html), the > design world has become pretty aware of the whole issue of > open-source/freedom. However, there's not a lot of legal awareness > inside that ecosystem, which results in confusion such as the one you > remarked here regarding CC licensing of fonts (which remarkably few > designers see as software instead of content or artwork). Indeed, it's great that the awareness is rising, but it's very important for us to be serious and clear with our policy and not sloppy about licensing metadata and so on. As Nicolas M. rightfully pointed out earlier, I also see a big part of the OFLB's scope and purpose as encouraging such best practises. > To me at least, it looks like everybody would win if someone from the > OFLB would approach the guys from the 'League of Movable Type', and -- > who knows -- other designers who are releasing their fonts as freeware. I agree 100%. > * which, of course, can be very criticised for its apparent confusion > between freeware and libre; however, it does clearly state that 'Like > open source software, the freedom of the fonts shown on this page is > made explicit through their licensing, which allows other people to not > only use the fonts but to modify them'. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] CC Attribution Share Alike Licence & fonts
Christopher Fynn wrote: > This site <http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/> distributes fonts > under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike Licence > <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/> > Which allows copying, distribution and attributed derivative works under > the same, similar or a compatible license. > > Is this an acceptable license for the Open Font Library? I would say no: because of the major issue that Creative Commons licenses are designed and used for content and not software. CC strongly discourages using a CC combination for software: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F IMHO we don't want to add extra confusion to the choice of licenses. > The terms seem effectively similar to those of SIL's Open Font License. Mmm, not really. Where's the explicit embedding provision? the explicit bundling provision? The name change provision to protect collisions and keep artistic integrity while allowing branching? the font-specific vocabulary? > - Chris -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Objectives of OFLB
> The new OFLB desparately needs these sections: > > A section dedicated to the proprietary commercial potential for fonts > derived from fonts licensed as "open source type" fonts. Show people where > they > can sell their derivative fonts, how to setup a business. > > Plus a section strongly advising people submitting fonts to openfontlibrary > to avoid using "copyleft" licenses, as this might diminish or destroy > their potential for future use in proprietary fonts. How about taking your trolling elsewhere? Go ahead and create your own completely separate iwantoleechyourfonts.com if that's what you want. I doubt you'll have much success. Don't feed the anonymous troll. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] http://testvm.openfontlibrary.org/
> After seeing Nicolas' cool OFL T shirt, I want to be able to sell T > shirts at the launch to raise money with our nice new logo :-) Yeah, the 2 t-shirts I had crudely made the day before flying to Montréal were just iron transfers of these 2 images: http://oflb.open-fonts.org/front-human-readable.png the human readable representations of the working model of an open font http://oflb.open-fonts.org/back-OFL-preample.eps the preamble of the OFL 1.1 I'm sure we can do better... more URLs, the OFLB logo, fontforge's logo, a blurb about libre/open fonts, tag clouds, the logos of our patrons, whatever :-) Let's see your design proposals! -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
[OpenFontLibrary] wiki spam
Seems our wiki is hit by spammers. Anybody here on the list would like to help clean it up? Thanks, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Open Font Library Podcast: Dev Talk #1
library not an upstream hosting site: OFLB publication is an end-stage of upstreams, upstream will release new versions which will be packaged on the desktops as well as released on the library for web use: the number versionning should support that and not create conflicts. Branches should be distinguishable among themselves. BTW, for the renaming requirements of downstream branches, it's not just changing the name of the filename but the font name inside the font: the way the font presents itself to the user via a font menu/font cache. But in the context of webfonts linking both should probably be in sync. A branch of oflb.org/people/benweiner/puritan-2.0-1.otf (font name Puritan) should probably be oflb.org/people/fooauthor/foo-1.0-1 (font name Foo) with a entry somewhere indicating the branch relationships. I find the fontaine classification with the visual icons really excellent: it will be a good resource. Thanks for all the time and energy you already put into all this. Very promising work! Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] http://testvm.openfontlibrary.org/
Nicolas Spalinger wrote: >> Any news on importing the current OFLB code into svn? >> Thanks for the hard work already done on all this. > > Could someone please put the current work in a repository somewhere so > others can help out? > > Thanks! Sorry about the duplicated message :( Anyway if you're not ready for a public repository, I'd like a private tarball to contribute from. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] http://testvm.openfontlibrary.org/
> Any news on importing the current OFLB code into svn? > Thanks for the hard work already done on all this. Could someone please put the current work in a repository somewhere so others can help out? Thanks! -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] http://testvm.openfontlibrary.org/
> Any news on importing the current OFLB code into svn? > Thanks for the hard work already done on all this. Could someone please put the current work in a repository somewhere so others can help out? -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font team / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] http://testvm.openfontlibrary.org/
Jon Phillips wrote: > Ok, actually Ben and Ed, I think better for you guys to login and look > at testvm, and import the site into OFLB SVN. I need to step back from > this right now for some high priority projects that I have to do to > pay the billz. Any news on importing the current OFLB code into svn? Thanks for the hard work already done on all this. > Jon Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font team / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] What's the big deal about @font-face anyway?
> But I think for many people @font-face will be a great enabler: they > will have a much nicer solution for publishing content on the web (or > platforms using web-technologies) via open standards and have to worry > about pictures and problematic encodings to represent text. and NOT have to worry about pictures and problematic encodings to represent text. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] What's the big deal about @font-face anyway?
Behdad Esfahbod wrote: > Hi, > > I hope I don't get flamed for this. I'm not a typophile, but an > i18n'er. I've been working all my adult life making sure GNOME is > accessible to people in any language they wish to use it with. I fully > understand the importance of having good, high quality, legible, fonts. > I also appreciate an Open font library. :-) > I was making a video last week > and wanted a fancy script font. Surfed to OFLB and downloaded one in > under a minute. > > What I don't understand is, why is it a good idea to let website > designers choose what font *I* read their text with? It's a basic > usability question. I don't have Tahoma and Verdana and Arial installed > for a reason. I like the text I read the way I read it the easiest. You could always override other people's design choices in your own browser if needed: http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserContent.css http://uwstopia.nl/blog/2006/01/my-fonts-are-better-than-yours > So, please tell me, how is making it easier for website designers to > enforce their type on me a good thing? More freedom to them :-) IMHO there will always be good and less good designs... Beauty in the eyes of the beholder as they say but with an open web, the beholder can tweak things to his linking too. But I think for many people @font-face will be a great enabler: they will have a much nicer solution for publishing content on the web (or platforms using web-technologies) via open standards and have to worry about pictures and problematic encodings to represent text. > Thanks, > behdad -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Site terminology: Fonts/Typefaces
Dave Crossland wrote: > Hi, > > At the LGM2009 Nicolas and I had some discussions about the OFLB > terminology, and I thought I'd raise these points on the list for > wider discussion. > > One of the terms was the Fonts/Typefaces distinction. > > Nicolas felt that the current v2 site uses the term "typefaces" too > much (I hope you can explain here why) Alright, my main concern was that we somehow suddenly loose the explicit recognition of the software nature of fonts: - we may endanger the legal status of the fonts submitted to us by designers wishing to reserve some right on their fonts: attribution and copyleft. - we loose an opportunity to explain to our users the difference between typeface and font If the typeface is the "design" or the set of characters forming a whole family similar in style then the font is the software expression of that design, right? The original piece of metal (from which the word font comes from) is now a piece of software when the design is expressed/implemented. If we only publish the "designs": a nice ethereal concept of beauty thought up by a skilled designer, and we do not talk about fonts as the digital representation and expression of that design as software, then it seems to me that we open a dangerous possibility: what's preventing people from using their peculiar local legal system to take the "designs" and modify them against their authors' will embodied in their chosen licensing? In effect abusing their creation via our hosting service? IMHO we can't keep on saying that we don't really know if fonts are software or not... We need to make a stand and explain that clearly for both authors and users. Through the Berne convention authors worldwide can assert their copyright + licensing on their creation and not have others take their creations and use it ways they don't intend. (the US is also a signatory to the Berne convention). With our free software license we use copyright to actually secure continued access to our software and prevent lockup and exclusivity: we grant and reserve rights. So we are interested in the global standing of copyright law. I think we need to the upload and the download page clearer on that aspect. For example, the TypoFonderie EULAs talk about both typeface design and fonts. I suspect to get around this potential problem. (The laws in France (article L112-1) explicitly mention "oeuvres typographiques" as being protected by droit d'auteur (copyright law) and there is jurisprudence (judicial precedent)) but I suspect designers are worried about other jurisdictions. > and I feel that since people > who make new fonts/typefaces talk about themselves as typeface > designers and talk about typefaces, we should "speak their language" > as much as possible; and that the distinction between the two is quite > a fine detail and its okay to refer to each as the other when not > talking precisely. I fully agree with speaking the language of designers but AFAIK they also speak about fonts and their software nature. We also need to be clear for our users. Users don't have typeface folders, typeface menus, typeface managers and so on on their desktops do they? AFAICT they mostly talk about fonts. > What do you think? > > Cheers, > Dave Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Site terminology: Free/Open/Libre
> One of the terms was the Free/Open/Libre distinction. I have been > using the term "free fonts" or "free software fonts" in all my work, > including work on the OFLB, and likewise Nicolas has been doing the > same with the term "open fonts." I've also been using "libre fonts" and "free software fonts" depending on the audience. (and probably for a good while longer: SIL's research and work on collaborative font design and related licensing issues starts around 2001). "free fonts" and "free software fonts" aren't really interchangeable expressions. I agree that it's not all that confusing to use "free software fonts" it's just rather impractical as we first have to explain what "free software" itself means to designers, not exactly an easy task as you know. The "free fonts" expression is already widely used (has been for a long time) to describe fonts which are freeware-distribute-but-don't-modify. Using that name to signify something else entirely is very unproductive. Seriously, we are shooting ourselves in the foot (our collective feet! ouch!) if we continue using and promoting this ambiguous term. Try your preferred search engine for a demonstration of what it refers to the vast majority of the time. > Nicolas feels strongly that the term "free" should not be used, as it > is too highly associated with freeware fonts, and ambiguity with the > "gratis" meaning causes too much confusion, so it should not be used > on the site. Seems only logical to me not reuse an existing term to make it mean the opposite, doesn't it? I would think I'm not the only one. Or do you really want to spend your life re-explaining an existing expression and how it really means the opposite? I don't. A case I made in an earlier mail to this list is that when a big serious well-known foundry like Ascender distributes "free fonts" they don't mean what you mean at all: http://www.ascenderfonts.com/info/mayberry-pro-free-font.aspx And another example from Letterror: http://www.letterror.com/foundry/goodies/index.html Using a different term helps us reduce the perception that proprietary foundries like to spread that there are professional fonts on one side and all the other amateur "free fonts" on the other side are useless or a very reduced offering in terms of quality/seriousness. Again, we are NOT yet another "free font site". IMHO if we persist in labelling ourselves like that then we loose. I do feel getting the semantics right at this stage helps us build the right level of trust by distinguishing ourselves from the others freeware font sites. Also the open font community is larger than the OFLB: not all upstreams care about the library, the webfonts are coming strong but there will still be a lot of focus on open fonts on the desktop. > I feel strongly that "open" is also confusing because it doesn't bring > to mind the primary goal, freedom, and this has concrete disadvantages > like not publishing source files. So, are you against "open standards" "open content" "open knowledge" too then? Again, I need to point out that freedom, as in the 4 core freedoms defined by the FSF, can happen with a weak copyleft which encourages as much source release as possible without making it mandatory. Font binaries are editable sources: it is untrue that no source is published. I think your rhetoric here is rather misguided! Especially with the work going on improving the build path, especially for fonts implementing complex scripts behaviours and on best practises for releasing extended font sources... IMHO you should really focus on fixing the various existing issues with strong copyleft licensing in the context of fonts instead of criticizing the other models :-) Ultimately we let the designers choose where on the spectrum of licenses they prefer to live. > He and I have been discussing this for at least 2 years, and it seems > we are unlikely to resolve this difference. We both agree that "libre" > solves both our problems, and although it introduces problems of its > own - it is not a native English word, and so the meaning must be > explained to most people - we are happy to focus on that term as a > compromise. My suggestion is consciously dropping "free fonts" because of dangerous ambiguity and using libre/open fonts because of existing adoption. The name of our common community-supported license and the name of library aren't going to change. English doesn't belong to the English anymore :-) Seriously the libre term is increasingly used because it reduces ambiguity and I think following that trend is very good for our community. > Another alternative is to refer to our fon
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] use of (c) typefaces
Dave Crossland wrote: > Hi, > > I brought this up in my talk at lgm2009, should be online at > river-valley.tv <http://river-valley.tv> soon, and one of the attendees > suggested we ask foundries to have whoever looks out on the web for > their stuff being redistributed without authorisation to keep an eye on > our 'new uploads' rss feed. They have access to their fonts, they have > wtf and so on, they have access to our fonts, and they have an interest > in us not sharing their stuff unintentionally. I think our moderation approach should tackle the issue from 3 different angles: - enforcing a review queue for all uploads to catch unintended mistakes (pre-moderation) - providing a feed to foundries for them to do the checking (post-moderation) - building a community-maintained db of metadata including fingerprints of restricted fonts (centralized matching resources) Stani Michiels of SPE and Phatch fame came up with a POC python script to create a obfuscated visual fingerprint of a font with its own shapes to allow comparison and matching. I'm thinking that we could distribute such a script and that legitimate owners of restricted fonts could contribute fingerprints to a common database (a bit like the user-maintained community db MusicBrainz). The script could run from fontmatrix's python console for example. BTW the title of this thread is a bit misleading: the libre/open fonts also rely on the author's (c) copyright and chosen free software licensing to remain distributable and modifiable. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] font linking bandwidth issues
James Weiner wrote: > Hello fellow OFLBers, > > I have a little problem you might like to mull over, one that could > apply to any font using font linking on the web. > > I'm currently working on a web site that uses a common font, but the > font is not common enough that I can rely on the font stack (which > depends on people having it installed), so I was wanting to use font > linking to pull it into the site. The only problem is that the total > size of the two weights of the font is ~600Kb which is far too much to > expect people to download (even with broadband as fast download time is > crucial for text). Something up to 100Kb would be OK. Does anyone know > any way of sub-setting a font easily? It's a commercial font and I have > a license covering its use on the web but I can't edit the font files > directly. > > Any help appreciated! > > Cheers, James Hi James, Well, if the license doesn't permit modification, technical solutions are not going to be able to help... With a font you have rights to modify I'd recommend trying out using http://fonts.philip.html5.org/ for which source code is released under MIT/X11. Notice how it does the subsetting gracefully: it does not strip away upstream copyright and licensing notices and handles renaming properly. HTH -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OFLB at LGM2009?
Dave Crossland wrote: > 2009/4/7 Dave Crossland : >> I've been putting off my LGM2009 flights/room bookings, and am now at >> the point where I have to say I really doubt I will be able to go. > > I have had a change of fortune and am now going to attend! :) Great news :-) Hopefully there's still room on the flight from Paris. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OFLB at LGM2009?
Nicolas Spalinger wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I've been putting off my LGM2009 flights/room bookings, and am now at >> the point where I have to say I really doubt I will be able to go. >> >> Since I'd like to have the OFLBv2 progress presented there, I wonder >> who is definitely going, and would like to to offer help to someone to >> present OFLB at LGM2009. > > > Hi Dave and everyone, > > I'll be in Montréal (got my ticket but still have to sort out > accommodation). Finally got around to booking a room at the Studios Hotel. >> The single hour slot for a bunch of shorter font talks worked well in >> the past, so perhaps that should be done again... :-) > > If necessary I'll be glad to help present material from other folks who > can't be there. I've asked Louis about a slot for such lightning talks. We could present slides for other folks during that time. > Also, we're still working out what we'll do with the OSP and Dejavu team > members wrt a font design workshop. So what about the workshop now? Femke? Pierre? Ludivine? Dennis? What are we going to do? > There's also the tentative schedule for the TextLayout meeting: > http://freedesktop.org/wiki/TextLayout2009 Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font team / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Inspired Post about the Traditional Type Foundries
Richard Querin wrote: > I came across this is my feed reader and thought it might be an > interesting read for people on this list: > > http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundries > > RQ Sigh... I don't see how such offensive discourse is useful to anyone. IMHO you can voice your opinion without turning everything into a flamewar... It's not a us vs. them. There are foundries out there doing open fonts or paid to do open fonts. I'd distance myself from such a agressive discourse. I personnally am not out to destroy any foundry. If designers and foundry see the benefit in a more open licensing and collaborative approach it's great. But if they don't no mob should lynch them. I can see various people from this list have joined in the discussion... BTW, if you know of more feeds to add to our planet, let me know. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Incomplete fonts/dingbat fonts
> I don't see why a font that covered only certain symbol blocks -- > Dingbats, chess symbols, mathematical operators, or otherwise-- should > not be allowed on OFLB. In the future one will be able to search for > fonts meeting certain criteria -- such as covering a specific > orthographic block -- so as long as such fonts are properly constructed > (i.e. have a Unicode CMAP) and can be properly categorized in the site's > database, why not? I think Ed make a very good point. And decorative fonts can be tagged/classified as such. Also fonts are fonts and cliparts are cliparts. OCAL and OFLB may share the same hosting engine but goals, policies and formats are different. > Best - Ed -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OFLB at LGM2009?
> Hi, >=20 > I've been putting off my LGM2009 flights/room bookings, and am now at > the point where I have to say I really doubt I will be able to go. >=20 > Since I'd like to have the OFLBv2 progress presented there, I wonder > who is definitely going, and would like to to offer help to someone to > present OFLB at LGM2009. Hi Dave and everyone, I'll be in Montr=C3=A9al (got my ticket but still have to sort out accommodation). > The single hour slot for a bunch of shorter font talks worked well in > the past, so perhaps that should be done again... :-) If necessary I'll be glad to help present material from other folks who can't be there. Also, we're still working out what we'll do with the OSP and Dejavu team members wrt a font design workshop. There's also the tentative schedule for the TextLayout meeting: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/TextLayout2009 Cheers, --=20 Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OFL problems, IPA License annoyances
> Though addressing his point should not > require full rewrite of the license, just of the problem paragraph > (another bit should be clarifying the renaming clauses and make it > clear they're an option authors can shoose not to exercise). As indicated earlier, we feel this is sufficiently clarified in the OFL FAQ. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] extraction issues
Dave Crossland wrote: > 2009/4/7 Nicolas Spalinger : >> Please let's not do that > > No one is advocating doing this, for proprietary or libre fonts. I > think we all agree it would be improper, in both cases. > > But advocating having the feature implemented is not advocating using > it improperly. True but it's a subtle difference, IMHO still tricky to wrap your head around for many... >> I'm firmly opposed to the OFLB carrying any derivative fonts from such >> dubious extraction origin! I really don't want this behaviour associated >> with our community. > > I totally agree. I certainly hoped you would and I'm glad to hear that :-) -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OFL problems, IPA License annoyances
>> OTOH there's the great work of Arne Gotje on CJK fonts which may > well >> provide the community with a .jp font family with more >> re-usable and community-known licensing. > > And also don't forget the work of the WenQuanYi project, http://wenq.org/ Thanks for pointing that out. (it's hard for me to follow the development of this project as my understanding of Japanese is well... extremely limited). > But Japanese users may still argue that Gotje's project and the > WenQuanYi project are both "Chinese" font projects and that there are > stylistic differences among a subset of the Japanese Kanji ... > > Gotje is addressing the (actually very few ... ) stylistic differences > directly using TTC. At this point in time, I'm not sure how or if the > WQY project is dealing with the national glyph style differences ... Good point, I should ping Arne about this someday. > Best - Ed -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] extraction issues
Liam R E Quin wrote: > On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:17 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > >> Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket >> science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :) > > That would be a really really really bad feature to put into > fontmatrix, I'd say! > > Let's at least try to keep at least a little good will with > the commercial font designer community, if we actually > want to see professional font designers start to get > involved with open source. > > Liam I agree, attempting extraction for that purpose is really abusing the author's willingness to put out a PDF specimen for review/critique regardless of the chosen licensing. Dave and Ben can probably tell you how type design students and professionals from Reading or KABK react to that... :-( Please let's not do that and be perceived as thieves (harsh words I know but there you go). Being technically feasible is different than being good for the community in this particular scenario. It really sends the wrong message. If we want people to respect our licenses, let us respect theirs too as restrictive as they may be. A PDF specimen isn't a font source release. Of course someone is going to make the theoretical well-meaning argument of "at least one legal use is fine so we can do anything we want". IMHO this isn't reverse engineering for interoperability but plain illegal re-use of other people's work they didn't intend to share. Please understand that we're not trying to get as many designers as possible to hate us, that's not the goal. DRE: digital rights expression are just that: expressing the intent of the author. It it's ignored and trampled by users and peers how do you think authors are going to react? IHMO it's fairly simple: don't share something that the author hasn't shared and doesn't want to share. Don't know about you, but personally I prefer a reputation of giving and donating (share and share-alike) to that of being an extractor of other people's work that they didn't mean to share. The updated OFL FAQ has: Question: 1.13 If OFL fonts are extracted from a document in which they are embedded (such as a PDF file), what can be done with them? Is this a risk to Author(s)? Answer: The few utilities that can extract fonts embedded in a PDF will only output limited amounts of outlines - not a complete font. To create a working font from this method is much more difficult than finding the source of the original OFL font. So there is little chance that an OFL font would be extracted and redistributed inappropriately through this method. Even so, copyright laws address any misrepresentation of authorship. All Font Software released under the OFL and marked as such by the Author(s) is intended to remain under this license regardless of the distribution method, and cannot be redistributed under any other license. We strongly discourage any font extraction - we recommend directly using the font sources instead - but if you extract font outlines from a document please be considerate, use your common sense and respect the work of the Author(s) and the licensing model. I'm firmly opposed to the OFLB carrying any derivative fonts from such dubious extraction origin! I really don't want this behaviour associated with our community. I'm interested in what the others here think, and not just the vocal few. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OFL problems, IPA License annoyances
Ed Trager wrote: > Hi, > > On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Nicolas Mailhot > wrote: >> >> Le Lun 6 avril 2009 21:54, Dave Crossland a écrit : >> >>> A new OSI approved font license is out, the Japanese "IPA Font >>> License": >>> >>> http://opensource.org/licenses/ipafont.html >>> >>> The OFLB is only going to run with the most popular free font >>> licenses, to encourage license consolidation, so I doubt the OFLB will >>> accept IFL fonts anyway. >> I doubt anyone but the IPA people will use it, it is overly >> restrictive and makes it impractical to use anything but the original >> font. It's a very convoluted way to say "free to use but not modify) > > Exactly. > > I am guessing that the story behind this is that there are very few > FLOSS Japanese fonts, and the ones clearly available for inclusion in > Linux distributions until now are considered unsatisfactory. > > People have for a long time considered the IPA fonts better, but the > vagueness of the original IPA license, available only in Japanese, > made it impossible for the vendors to include with Linux > distributions. > > I know that Mike Fabian at SuSE, who happens to know Japanese, tried > for a long time to get clarification on the license. So now I guess > this newly published IPA Font License in English finally clears the > way for inclusion of the IPA fonts in Linux distributions ... And also, AFAIK Hideki Yamane and others from Debian Japan had translated the license and had various talks over a long period of time advocating a less restrictive model to IPA so that distros can include it. We can now see the results of these efforts for all users of the Japanese writing systems. It's great that IPA saw the benefits :-) So in a sense it's great news that they will re-release with a better license but for the future maintainership of this font family basically they're stuck in a silo, and I suspect the license might be somewhat of a barrier to contributors :-( OTOH there's the great work of Arne Gotje on CJK fonts which may well provide the community with a .jp font family with more re-usable and community-known licensing. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > > Le Jeu 26 mars 2009 09:33, Alexandre Prokoudine a écrit : >> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 7:50 AM, minombresbond wrote: >>> Warning: SIL Open Font License >>> http://perens.com/blog/2009/02/17/64/ >>> >>> >>> "There appears to be an unintended loophole that would allow the >>> conversion of any font under the license to public domain." >> Can't tell until he bothers to actually explain the problem. So far he >> only managed to say how lousy creators of OFL were. > > Basically, his opinion is that the license does not make clear that > even though the OFL effects do not extend to works OFL material is > embedded in, the embedded material is still protected by the OFL. So > according to him one could strip licensing of any OFL font by > embedding it then extracting the result. Bruce's concern is misguided by the practicalities of the issues related to font extraction. Notice how with *all his history and experience in licensing* he still uses conditional expressions... Beyond the ad hominem criticizing (yeah, we never have enough flamewars to keep us from working together!), I don't think he has had time to do full research on the subject. His statement that SFLC attorneys (or others in the community for that matter) have not looked at the license is simply untrue. Also his statement "the SIL license" is untrue: he ignores the fact that SIL has also released various pieces of libre software under LGPL, GPL, MIT/X11. He was mixing the concepts of bundling with that of embedding. I think you will all agree that an embedded font (an actual part of the document it is embedded in) is not fully bit-identical to its original upstream format: the act of embedding will transform the font to make it usable from within that document. If extraction is attempted then the resulting file will not be the same as the original upstream font. If you copy the font file inside a zipped-up document structure like he suggested and copy it out you haven't done embedding nor extraction you are just bundling/redistributing the same font unchanged which is explicitly allowed but does not allow anyone to strip away the copyright and the licensing the authors have chosen. As steward of the OFL for the community we have published an updated FAQ (version 1.1-update1) to continue providing practical help to users and authors of open fonts with expanded sections covering issues like embedding, web fonts and extraction: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web It's well-worth noting that Bruce's concerns didn't prevent the OSI board from now officially recognizing the OSD (Open Source Definition) compliance of the OFL v1.1 and listing it on the approved licenses page: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical They now join the rest of the community in officially recognizing the usefulness of the OFL for collaborative font design. Now, how do other font license who claim community input and review actually deal with the extraction issue? That would be our next challenge... Though experiment: By Bruce's line of thought any random person could include all GPL-ed fonts inside a zip and copy them back out to re-release them... The current GPL font exception certainly does not cover that very clearly (and I'm not talking about the other problems). All the source requirements (as hard to define as they are) are now gone! Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] OFL problems, IPA License annoyances
Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > > Le Lun 6 avril 2009 21:54, Dave Crossland a écrit : > >> A new OSI approved font license is out, the Japanese "IPA Font >> License": >> >> http://opensource.org/licenses/ipafont.html >> >> The OFLB is only going to run with the most popular free font >> licenses, to encourage license consolidation, so I doubt the OFLB will >> accept IFL fonts anyway. > > I doubt anyone but the IPA people will use it, it is overly > restrictive and makes it impractical to use anything but the original > font. It's a very convoluted way to say "free to use but not modify) Indeed, I don't think what the world needs now is having every well-meaning government agency cook up their own incompatible project-specific license... Sounds like a recipe for future combinatoric nightmare... >> I hope this will help in the updating of the GNU GPL Font Exception >> :-) I don't think it's such a useful source of inspiration... > I don't think it it very well worded. For example it seems the > licensing only lays the rules for direct recipients of a document with > embedded fonts. The definitions had some potential, but they spoiled > it by being overly verbose and distinguishing "digital content" from > "digital document file". > > They would have been better advised to lay minimal conditions in > simple words and not let their lawyers pile up unrelated fell-good > material in the licensing. Yes, legalese at maximum density, with references to references :-( -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] libre/open fonts
Nicu Buculei wrote: > fontfree...@aol.com wrote: >> >I highly recommend "libre/open fonts" instead to describe fonts which >> >respect the 4 foundational software freedoms as defined by the FSF in >> >the specific context of fonts: run the program for any purpose, study >> >and adapt the program to your needs, distribute copies of the program, >> >improve and release improvements to the program. >> >> Being unfamiliar with the word "libre", I've checked several >> dictionaries online, and printed ones, and i've come to the conclusion >> libre isn't a word in the English language. I did find "librae", which >> is defined as the British Pound. Perhaps we should stick to using >> words which have previously been defined in dictionaries when >> describing how free and open our fonts are? > > The term is in wide use http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libre > > It was introduced precisely because the English word "Free" is not good > enough due to the confusion with "gratis" Yes, you're entirely right about this. The ambiguity doesn't exist in many languages from the Romance family: liber, libre, livre, liber, libero, lliure, etc (finding the corresponding language is left as an exercise to the fine people on this list)... And as we can see from this page on the FSF's website, they are recommended translation of the concept of Free Software: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/fs-translations.html "Libre" as in Libre Graphics Meeting or Libre Planet, a recent FSF event: http://www.fsf.org/associate/meetings/2009/ -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] licence
Dave Crossland wrote: > 2009/3/22 Kess Vargavind : >> While personally I would prefer FONTLOG, since all capitals stands out >> among the other files. And to me, all capitals denote a file with >> metacontents. I did not like this naming convention a few years ago, >> but its practicality has grown on me. > > Yes, and I like it because its SHOUTING ALL CAPS is useful to say > "This is an important file you should look at, dear user" :-) Very good point. It's also written in capitals in the OFL FAQ: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web#00e3bd04 (where the concept and the name thought up by Victor Gaultney originally comes from). -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] licence
> Your thoughts make sense. > But don't you think that introducing "free/libre" would just add a new > level of confusion? Thanks, but my suggestion is libre/open fonts not free/libre. Precisely to reduce confusion. [..] > (And I'm willing to explain the difference between "gratis" and > "freedom" until every freeware font resource starts labeling its stuff > "gratis/no-cost/giveway/..whatever" instead of just "free".) Mmm, do you realise that the ambiguity benefits them and that IMHO they are unlikely to want to clarify? In a similar way than freeware sites or mainstream computer magazines consciously re-labeling software under FSF-approved licenses as "freeware"... How much spare time do you have :-) Better start soon... or maybe not... -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] licence
> I still haven't reached a conclusion on how to described free fonts > best. "free fonts" speaks to freeware fonts that are often > non-commercial, non-modifiable and even non-redistributable. Exactly! Let me try and make the case for another term again :-) (quickly as other commitments want my time). Just try a "free font" search in your preferred search engine and see what comes up. (it's also worth nothing that a pan Unicode font project is called "FreeFont": interesting case of blanket semantic re-appropriation). You can easily see that the huge majority of well-know designers and foundries which sometimes release "free fonts" are doing it under restricted licensing: here's a recent example from Ascender: http://www.ascenderfonts.com/info/mayberry-pro-free-font.aspx They can do what they want but for us to be using the very same term to describe what our community is doing is not a good idea! Only a potentially painful source of confusion :-( "free fonts" is really a semantic trap we should avoid... I disagree with the purpose of consciously choosing an ambiguous term which will confuse/dilute even further the notion of redistributable-modifiable font software for the vast majority of the font design community. I don't think want to spend our life trying to re-explain/assign new meaning to the concept of what our community is doing to everyone who has been associating "free fonts" with freeware-do-not-modify-redistribute-sell-fonts for ages. How can we distance ourselves and express our focus on quality if we use the same term? This ambiguity would actually harm our goals. I highly recommend "libre/open fonts" instead to describe fonts which respect the 4 foundational software freedoms as defined by the FSF in the specific context of fonts: run the program for any purpose, study and adapt the program to your needs, distribute copies of the program, improve and release improvements to the program. I think there's a good reason both license and library already have "open" in the name. (Note that I'm advocating "libre/open" and not "open source"). What do others think? Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] licence
Ben Weiner wrote: > Hi, > > Robert Martinez wrote: >> also should we use "FONTLOG" or "Fontlog" (is there a reason for >> capitalizing it?) > I think it's simply that the name FONTLOG follows the name README and > INSTALL as found in software distributions. People say: "Read the > README" so we say "Read the FONTLOG". > > Ben Yes, as you know, the reasoning behind the FONTLOG is to provide a descriptive template which merges the essential items from the usual README/CHANGELOG/NEWS file, taking into account GNU/Free Software conventions in software tarballs, but adding the specific structure necessary for collaborative font design. The majority of open fonts using a FONTLOG are released with a FONTLOG.txt file in their tarball: with both caps and a .txt extension to make it easier cross-OS and filesystems. I suggest we continue recommending the capitalized + txt. extension form. Especially with the FONTLOG integration in FontForge. Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] [Open Font Library] Upload Flagged
Jon Phillips wrote: > Ok, I challenge you to lead the audit. I also challenge Raph to help to. Well, I'll do my best to help with this. (Don't think Raph will have time). We're all busy but hopefully it doesn't mean we loose sight of the goal of a trustworthy quality open font library. > At the end of the day, whoever gets this done, and gets the site up > I'm looking forward to. True. I didn't mean to sound negative. > I personally will help get the site up asap, and am eager to get this > project on regular track(s) as well :) And thanks a lot for all you've done so far :-) > Jon -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font team / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
