[Openfontlibrary] Font site wishlist

[Ed Trager]

On 10/30/06, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> On 30 Oct 2006 07:07:46 -0800, George Williams <gww at silcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > > The features needed to support such collaboration (essentially some
> > > form of version control, where the glyphs in a font may exist in
> > > numerous versions)
> >
> > Is version control something that should be built in to a font editor,
> > or is cvs adequate?
>
> CVSish repositories (SVN, git, bazaar, etc) with existing big-grain
> file formats - ie one file per font, be it sfd, otf, ttf type1 or
> whatever - are not perfect compared to the file-grain of UFO, because
> its hard to see which glyphs changed and to pick and mix the glyphs
> from various development branches using the standard tools.
>
> Version control built right into a font editor that supports UFO is
> definitely a great feature, as its a natural fit to the fine grained
> nature of the format.

No, please don't build version control into the font editor!  Version
control software is evolving all the time.  If you build it into the
font editor, whatever choices you make will become obsolete too
quickly.  It will be much better to simply make the font editor
support some sort of SVG+XML file-system-based file format for fonts
that all of the SCM systems - Git, SVK, SVN, etc. - will be able to
support forever. Again please take a look at p. 16 of
http://unifont.org/textlayout/TheBigPicture.pdf and see what you
think.  The approach suggested in the paper is consistent with the
age-old *nix design philosophy of creating tools that are really good
at doing one thing, and then using those tools together to achieve
larger results.

- Ed Trager