Hi, We're thinking of submitting a proposal or two to the Google Summer of Code project and wanted to get some input from the community on ideas. Once we've got a few proposals I'll create a wiki page and put all the ideas on there, but for now I just wanted to gauge interest.
In terms of mentoring, I'm happy to be a mentor and I've registered as one and if any other committers fancy the job, do register, the more the merrier. The deadline is 9th March, so that doesn't give us long to bounce around ideas, but here are a few I was thinking: - There have been recent discussions between Jeremias, myself and others about extracting the Fonts packages into their own library. I think this would be a great idea for a project because essentially it only involves a few, well defined specifications (TTF, Type1 etc) and doesn't expose the person to too much complexity. The way I'd suggest this to be done, is by re-writing rather than porting, that way it gives the person much more flexibility and also the current code would give them good tips and tricks on how to deal with parsing fonts. - TTF in AFP. I know we still have the TrueTypeInPostScript branch flying around, and however much I'd like to fob that onto someone else, I don't think it's fair to do so. I have no idea how long this project would take, but I think FOP could really benefit from it. Currently we're forcing users to use AFP fonts for AFP documents, a lot of which are archaic and use EBCDIC, for those of you who haven't been exposed to EBCDIC, count yourself lucky. There may be something to do with PCL?? I'm not at all familiar with the format, but I do remember discussions about upgrading to a newer PCL standard? I'd be happy to acquaint myself with the format if there's interest in the idea. Hopefully we can get a proposal together in time. Mehdi
