We don't know exactly the reasons why James has closed his website or even his support for this font. But if he really was alone he probably did not havethe money to support the site, or the bandwidth used for it (may be he's now in financial troubles, like loss of his job in this hard times). Or may be a receive a DMCA warning and did not have the money to defend his work.
That's the risk when you work alone without any profit from your work, despite you wanted to contribute to a much larger community that recognized his work. At some point, he should have realized that, to defend his work, he should have deposited on a serious online repository defended by lots of people and supporters (many choices: GNU Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Apache Foundation, Ubuntu, and even Sourceforge), where the work would have been saved, while at the same time allowing him to choose helpful contributors to maintain the repository or track the discussions and bug reports, and propose changes and enhancements. We will miss Code2000, Code2001 and Code2002, because free and open-sourced fonts still lack good coverage of lots of scripts with quality fonts, and at least those full-plane fonts could be used as a reasonable fallback to catch all those that were and are still missing. Now we are left with the excellent Everson Mono font, that unfortunately only covers the BMP, but not completely due to technical problems/limitatons in the font editing tools used by Michael. This is also a demonstration that creating large fonts is still a difficult challenge, even for experts. And that we still need a serious revamp of font editing tools that would be maintained and usable by much more people, and based on non-proprietary editable databases for glyph definitions. I just hope that one day, the SVG-font format will be extended to include the script/language and typographic features (notably the substition and positioning rules and lookup tables, at first, then the optional support for hinting instructions and programs, something that will now be less necessary with the growing screen resolution including on small devices), in such a way that fonts will be less monolithic, more easily extensible (thanks to the XML format which is highly interchangeable), and even allowing fast and incremental distribution of glyph definitions and features via very small request to an online font server that will also be able to serve smartphones, without requiring to install fonts that hard difficult to track in their versions and not easily updatable (web distribution allows the management of a font cache directly bounf to the HTTP client cache). We could even have fonts directly manageable in the HTML5 dataset, where they would be preparsed for fast rendering. And it would be time now to promote the SVG font format because it is much more easily updatable, and can forget lots of bad legacies susbisting in the OpenType (or ISO open font) format. I just wonder who is working on enhancing the SVG format to make it equally capable, at least for international support, with OpenType (leaving hinting for later, notably because SVG renderers all have support now for excellent subpixel rendering, transparency, and in a more generic way that is agnostic to the pixel geometries and alternate color spaces that start appearing with more than 3 pigments and subpixels with different relative geometries/surfaces depending on their native pigment, as well as new refinements for those pigments or microoptical lenses correcting the anisotropy of subpixels alignments, or multilayered screen surfaces, and alternative non-orthogonal grids for better isotropy that avoids very undesirable moiré artefacts: all those things that ClearType for example does not cope with, as well as basic OpenType hinting). Basically, I am convinced now that font hinting has little or no future, it just complicates things in trying to solve another more typographical problem (i.e. the humane vision artefacts, which soon will be also personnalisable as well for each user depending on his effective vision and preferences). For the rest, the problem of readable small fonts should be the same as the general problem of rendering textures in photography, and trying to remove the artefacts caused by artificially quantized pixel geometries and colorspaces. 2011/11/7 Andrew West <andrewcw...@gmail.com>: > On 7 November 2011 08:34, <a...@peoplestring.com> wrote: >> >> Code2000 supports most BMP code points of Unicode 5.2. It is open sourced >> from September: >> >> http://code2000.sourceforge.net/ > > I have doubts as to whether this project was actually created by James > Kass. The project comprises the last public version of code2000.ttf > and a 210MB "code2000.asm" file which turns out to be a dump of the > ttf file in human-readable form, both of which could easily have been > put onto SourceForge in contravention of copyright and license by > someone pretending to be James who wants the font to be open source > now that the official Code2000 site has disappeared. James once told > me that Code2000 was maintained as a "66 megabyte dBASE III database > file" which is not what is on SourceForge. > > Andrew > >
