[Openfontlibrary] Raph's font format

[Dave Crossland]

On 31/10/06, Raph Levien <raph.levien at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/31/06, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> > > interesting new
> > > features that I believe make them absolutely ideal for font design.
> >
> > Sounds like JUST the kind of 'secret sauce' the Free Font Movement
> > needs to leverage itself beyond what is possible in the proprietary
> > font world! :-)
>
> I'm hoping, but my experience is also that people have a lot of
> resistance to adopting new ideas.

For a font developer to be into the Free Font Movement, they have to
be fairly memetically plastic :-)

> Hopefully, my stuff is so good it
> will overcome that resistance, but we'll just have to see.

:-D

> Part of it is just a style question. There are some people who feel
> that XML is magic pixie dust that has the power to turn anything into
> gold. This belief was actually fairly commonplace a few years ago, but
> appears to be abating.

Mmm yes. Markdown/Textile and YAML are examples of this IMO.

> Knowing how to avoid that is
> a specialized skill which is difficult to acquire.

Bad. Ass.

> As a result, I don't believe that carving multiple static masters,
> then having a tool to do interpolation between them, is ultimately the
> right approach.

> Metafont, I think, is closer to the mark conceptually,

>From the little I've seen, it seems like a tidy parameterisation of
roman type. I'll write about my parameterised design philosopher soon
:-)

> but it was killed by the need to code up the structure of the font in
> a highly nonuntuitive programming language.

I believe there's also a technical reason, though I don't really
understand metafont yet: it also doesn't make outlines because
overlapping was a Hard problem in 1980s, so its not that useful for
making fonts for use outside TeX.

>  [I can barely understand
> metafont source files, and that's saying something]

LOL

> The right question to ask about a variation technology is: why have so
> few designers learned it? If you get rid of Knuth, Slimbach, and
> Letterror, the number of  fonts with variation goes down to
> approximately zero. I'm hoping that I won't simply add my name to that
> list, that my tools will be accessible to large numbers of users.

I hope I can help in this regard :-)

> > > UFO is
> > > definitely a possibility for such things, but from what I can see is
> > > still pretty unfinished.
> >
> > Forking UFO would be very bad - trying to attract the more technically
> > savvy font developers, who all use RoboFab and UFO, is a definite goal
> > of the Free Font Movement.
>
> What do you mean by forking UFO?

George already extended it a little bit - AKA started to fork it - in
his initial FontForge import/export implementation this week.

> taking control of the UFO spec, adding features I
> need and changing stuff around?

Aye

I suppose renaming your forked format would be the minimum courtesy,
but it wouldn't help to gravitate the more technically savvy propriety
font developers to our community - whereas moving the UFO spec forward
with its original authors would.

-- 
Regards,
Dave