[Openfontlibrary] Font File Type and Admins?

[Dave Crossland]

Hi all,

I'd first like to second Jon's thanks to George for sharing his
expertise there :-)

On 25 Oct 2006 10:14:24 -0700, George Williams <gww at silcom.com> wrote:
>
>   1) Do you want to support pure bitmap fonts?
>   2) Do you want to support fonts with odd fills and transparencies?
>          (type3)
>   3) Do you want to support multi-master fonts?
>
> If the answer to these three questions is "No" then otf/ttf is clearly
> the solution.

I think we should support all formats. A friend of mine is big into
bitmap fonts and I hope he'll contribute to the Free Font Movement, so
it wouldn't be too good to exclude them.

In general I think Bitmap fonts is a relatively simple way of getting
into font development, and is very cool, especially with screen-based
designers.

The other formats are also quite obscure, but have their fans, so
becoming an important resource for people marginalised in the
proprietary font world is a good thing for us to do, I think.

...

Okay, my personal opinion is to have a simple submission scheme like:

1. Use the OFL
2. Include the source files used to make the font
3. Include at least one compiled font binary
4. Include a thumbnail and type specimen sheet

I understand we still need to debate 1, but this is my personal
opinion afterall :-)

Should 2 include only source files for free software applications?

3 and 4 could be done automatically for SFD.

4 could be either for the web (PNG) for print (PDF) or both.

...

I'm also wondering about UFO.

The UFO format from the TTX [1] project seems promising. Like most
forms of XML, its an interchange format for source code, not
functional code. A UFO is like a Mac OS X 'bundle', a folder with XML
files inside, that can be treated as one file. Each XML file inside
describes each glyph, and this eases collaborative working with
CVS/SVN/etc as you can get a simple changelog of each glyph. Being
XML, you can use whatever XML tools you are familiar with, like say
python.

UFO has some technical limitations at the moment though, it doesnt do
a bunch of important stuff like metrics yet, but it seems very
promising. The other problem is its proprietary nature; while the TTX
project is BSD licensed, UFO is mainly used by RoboFab [2] which is a
non-free set of python scripts for fontlab, the proprietary font
development application du jour. I believe that Gentium is developed
in FontLab; certainly most proprietary fonts are.

[1]: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/fonttools/
[2]: http://www.robofab.com/

-- 
Regards,
Dave