[Openfontlibrary] Font File Type and Admins?

[Raph Levien]

Grayscale bitmap fonts are also interesting, but unfortunately tools
to support their use are in poor shape. There's also the concept of
"photofonts" which blur the distinction between what's a font what's
not. Both of these could be wishlist items for after you get the
basics working, which I would define as OpenType fonts.

The "source" files for a font are also critically important for
hosting which follows the open source model. Currently, these are most
likely to be sfd. I've taken to writing a little FontForge script for
many of my fonts, to help touch up details like reversing the outlines
for mirrored references and the like. Dave's suggestion of UFO is also
plausible as a source format, but as far as I know it isn't widely
used - certainly until FontForge has native support for it.

I will also be defining my own source format, for use with a
(currently mostly manual, but eventually to be automated) tool for
converting to standard Bezier formats. With luck, extending your
hosting solution to handle these file types will be straightforward,
because you should be able to treat them as blobs.

And the best I can come up with so far on the slogan front is "fonts
of freedom."

Raph

On 10/25/06, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> 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
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