[Openfontlibrary] Free font foundry? (was: Re: [DejaVu-fonts] merge MPH 2B Damase into DejaVu?)

[Ben Laenen]

Hi Paul,


On Wednesday 14 November 2007, Paul Wise wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> [Please CC mark and I as we are not subscribed]
>
> Some of you may remember the earlier discussion[1] of the public
> domain font MPH 2B Damase[2]. Since no-one has come forward to
> maintain the font as a separate entity, I would like to propose that
> MPH 2B Damase be merged into DejaVu. Is there anyone on the
> dejavu-fonts list who would be able to do the work necessary to
> accomplish this? Some more information about the font is at [2]. I
> would really like to find this font a real home and maintainer
> instead of just dumped into Debian.
>
>      1. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.fonts/263
>      2. http://packages.debian.org/sid/ttf-mph-2b-damase


I'm thinking more about this for what to do with MPH 2B Damese:

As it currently is, some scripts, like basic Latin, are in a bad shape. 
They have no clean outlines and fixing them would take a lot of work.

I would rather see the scripts which have potential taken out into 
separate fonts (of the scripts I know, I'm thinking about Armenian and 
Arabic for example). These scripts still need quite some work to get 
them in good shape (there are no opentype tables for Arabic for 
example, which is really necessary to display them correctly).

Now, how to do this practically? I'm playing with the idea to set up a 
project which is basically a collection of small font projects (let's 
call it a Free font foundry...). The Open Font Library doesn't really 
qualify here, since we want to have collaboration and need things like 
repositories to put our font sources in, and OFLB is more about 
distributing the fonts at the moment. I don't know whether it's a 
prospect to extend OFLB with that functionality, but the two would seem 
to nicely complement each other.

Now, I'm still only playing with this idea (in fact, the idea was 
lingering long before MPH 2B, but we need some starting point to get 
the first fonts in, and MPH 2B would bring that opportunity).

Anyway, this is the time where I start asking about ideas and comments 
from other persons about this... :-) So let yourself be heard...

Greetings
Ben