1. Fonts

Improving the font landscape in GNOME.

Ideas/specs from the Libre Graphics Meeting, the Ubuntu summit and the GUADEC around fonts.

1.1. Bof reports

1.2. Font BoF @ Libre Graphics Meeting 2006 in Lyon

After a ligthning talk on the OFL (OFL: enabling collaborative font design), a BoF was organised around fontforge and open font developement with

• AndyFitzimon

• DaveCrossland

• JonPhilips

• VictorGaultney

• CarlWorth

• NicolasSpalinger

Discussion subjects included:

• hinting, the difficulties for designers and the lack of good tools, the possibilities to make hinting smarter with the rendering stack

• Owen Taylor's hinting review tool

• font licensing and the working model of the OFL

• the problems with embedding fonts and certain license requirements

• consolidating various projects around font catalogs (like unifont.org/openfontlibray.org/typeforge.net) with the need to emphasize quality and the possible problems with public domain from the designer's perspective -> the most mature being http://unifont.org

• the suggestion to extend ccHost to support the OFL
• wishlists/feature requests for fontforge and related tools

• a common font format between Fontforge and FontLab (UFO)

• a python interpreter for fontforge to be able to reuse FontLab scripts

• using Inkscape to do glyph design
• the research on curves by Raph Levien
• designing smart fonts (Opentype, AAT and Graphite)
• the ubuntu-title and Fedora_infinity font projects
• ways to reach the AtypI font design community: doing sessions at the Typetech forums or Robofab conferences
• ways to coordinate work on features in a team of designers
• ways to use revision control: svn, svk or bzr for the font design workflow

• the font widget proposal by Ed Trager

• Xetex: a fontconfig-aware TeX using native smart fonts

• better internationalisation of the font preview for GIMP (implemented post-LGM by Tor Lillqvist)

• moving forward via http://freedesktop.org

1.3. Font BoFs @ Ubuntu Summit 2006 in Paris

The post-Dapper and Edgy preparation Ubuntu summit happened in Paris. Two font-related specs were discussed there with:

• BenjaminMakoHill

• MichaelVogt

• JeffWaugh

• MatthiasKlose

• SebastienBacher

• NicolasSpalinger

Font management

• providing a smarter font list
• exposing the font metadata
• improving nautilus to expose current fonctionality and extend it to handle fonts better
• provide more internationalised font previews

Open fonts

• doing a distributed review of the most appropriate fonts per locale, the criteria being quality/coverage/freeness (and possibly size)
• finding and choosing a core common set of "metric-compatible" free/open fonts to get interoperable documents across distros

• improving the Rosetta UI to suggest fonts for rendering and inputting translations

• reviewing the Inconsolata terminal font project by Raph Levien

• licensing models: the OFL vs. other licenses for fonts wrt. embedding and the status of derivatives

• best practises for font packaging (Alioth and the Launchpad font team)

• language support recommends and fontconfig snippets for each language pack/locale

• the fontconfig-voodo tool and the fontconfig tab in the language selector

• creating a font-design-toolkit metapackage

• the font situation in the OLPC

1.4. Font BoF @ GUADEC 2006 in Vilanova

At the GUADEC 2006 edition, various talks touched upon the font landscape. Then, in the middle of the week, a informal BoF around fonts and i18n was organised with some of the font / i18n experts in the community:

• BehdadEsfahbod

• SimosXenitellis

• DenisJacquerye

• MaciejKatafiasz

• OgnyanKulev

• BehnamEsfahbod

• MichaelMeeks

• DulmandakhSukhbaatar

• DanielGlassey

• NicolasSpalinger

The following key subjects were discussed:

• doing a full review to find the most appropriate font per locale so as not to make the free desktop depend on restricted fonts

• doing cross-distro fontconfig fonts.conf refinement and sending the ideal configuration file upstream so that all distros behave similarly

• finding solutions to conflicting styles and experimental blocks in big/omnibus fonts: LGC (Latin Greek Cyrillic) split from other blocks and smarter fallback/blacklisting (fontconfig patch to blacklist by language or unicode block)

• Ed Trager's unifont.org font playground as a very useful tool for open font projects

• smarter font widget proposal

• Dejavu font family

• Farsiweb font families

• font families from SIL (Gentium, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Padauk, Abyssinica, Lateef, Scheerazade)

• shipping fonts with OpenOffice.org

• common licensing to be able to easily branch and exchange patches between font projects

• Open Font License working model

• a common LSB set of fonts for cross-distro interoperability

• smart rendering engines, opentype and Graphite support (via Graphite pango module)

• demo of XeTeX using fontconfig to access native fonts

• contact with GNOME foundation board members to discuss future of vera agreeing on a common FSF-recognized license (relicensing to OFL being a possibility suggested by Jim Gettys)
• resolving the issue of the GNOME logo using a non-free font
• improving font management via nautilus or a new font-manager (proposed SoC project not accepted this year) - specs for a rewrite of gucharmap/view/font-manager being defined

• looking at the fontforge GTK+ port and overall HIG-fication

• fontforge scripts
• selective build scripts
• hinting solutions: tools and smart rendering libraries (estimated price for hinting one glyph for the OLPC : $10)
• more granular font selection at installation
• config snippet per font packages to go into /etc/fonts/conf.d
• performance work with the font stack

2. Freedesktop related links

• http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts_2fConfiguration

• http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts_2ffonts_2econf

• http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts

3. Todo

• define the common font set
• gather the fontconfig snippets