I'm organizing an unconference on web fonts & @font-face use - http://fontconf.com
If you're passing through St. Paul, MN this summer - I'd love to have someone lead a session on the OFLB and the OFL (and related licenses). Details @ http://fontconf.com Thanks. ----------------------- Garrick Van Buren 612 325 9110 garr...@kernest.com ----------------------- Kernest.com Free and Commercial Web Fonts ----------------------- On Mar 10, 2010, at 10:56 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote: > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 05:00:57PM -0600, Barry Schwartz wrote: >> Khaled Hosny <khaledho...@eglug.org> skribis: >>> Well, things are changing now with the advent of LuaTeX, thanks to its >>> backward compatibility, it is taking slowly over TeX world (see ConTeXt >>> for example, which is being rewritten in Lua), unlike ANT which never >>> gained momentum. >> >> ANT, written almost entirely by one guy in an actual programming >> language, never gained momentum because people have had their minds >> numbed by TeX and glorified assembly languages. We have had issue >> after issue after issue of TUGboat, year after year, devoted to newer >> and more intricate ways to drive a nail with a sponge. The appeal is >> understandable; give me a chance to write in an assembly language, >> when I was still capable of such things, and I could get lost in >> it. Even fontforge is written in a mere glorified assembly language >> that is the main reason the program crashes, crashes, crashes, because >> the compiler is happy to compile stupid things that an OCaml compiler >> would never come close to accepting and which no one should have to >> worry about in 2010 in an application. > > I was not saying ANT is not good (well, I know no OCmal anyway), I'm > just saying that in a very conservative world like TeX, if you don't > maintain some level of backward compatibility (LuaTeX isn't fully > backward compatible), people will not adopt your engine. > > BTW, AFAIU, Knuth didn't want to have a programing language in TeX; the > macros was intended for users designing the layout of their books, every > one was expected to write their own extended TeX engine in pascal, but > nobody did :) > >> This is all kind of off-topic, but it is too easy to get sucked into >> bit twiddling. Bit twiddling is a curse on mankind. OFLB can have all >> kinds of bells and whistles, but some graphic design and an effort to >> appeal to actual, non-TeXie font-users have made League of Moveable >> Type a more productive place to post fonts, from my point of view >> wherein, frankly, TeXies can be taken for granted. They'll use >> anything capable of doing text, even if it is buried under three >> layers of tarballing in an ftp directory on an obscure host. >> >> :) > > Back to the main point, lets just hope OFLB v2 will ever be online, then > we can discuss all sorts of improving it, but I don't think it makes any > sense right now. > > Regards, > Khaled > > -- > Khaled Hosny > Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team > Free font developer