[Openfontlibrary] Font formats accepted by OFLB

[Ben Weiner]

Hi,

Ben Laenen wrote:
> On Saturday 25 October 2008, Ben Weiner wrote:
>   
>> Looks as though in the next OFLB site version we'll have to ask
>> people to upload individual files. We'd certainly need to unpack
>> archives if we allowed them, and ccHost currently cannot see inside
>> tarballs, facts that together mean we're best avoiding them.
>>     
>
> I completely disagree with that, and it won't work anyway. You assume 
> that fonts are always one file, or everything could be pushed into one 
> file.
Never ;-)

Although that sounds a bit like an archive to me :-)
>  If you look at DejaVu we have a *lot* more, like build files 
> (Makefile, some scripts to process the fonts when building etc), more 
> scripts that help in development, and other metadata files like 
> changelogs, readme, status files etc.
>
> Other projects have for example Xgridfit files for their hinting, or 
> other files that are used for building the fonts from source.
>   
Aha! Source. Nobody's come back to me on that. I know humans can read 
.sfd files. What about the 'source' files used by other font-authoring 
applications? Do we accept these even thought they're not amenable to 
reuse except by people who also own that software?

If we do decide to accept them, can someone provide a 'Hello 
Typographical World' example file for each? I  can do Macromedia 
Fontographer from my deep-stored Mac OS 8 box, but none of the others.
> If ccHost cannot handle zipped files, then too bad.
It can certainly handle them. What it doesn't do is make them usefully 
available in their unscrambled form. It's also not very deft with 
tarballs - although it'll accept them by default, you cannot find out 
what's inside them (without a plugin of some sort from the future, AFAIK).

Incidentally, there is no reason why what I'm informally calling the 
'typeface record' (the basic unit of ccHosting as applied to fonts, eg 
http://openfontlibrary.org/media/files/OSP/322) should not possess a mix 
of compiled fonts and zipped resources such as the source files and 
readmes. Anyone think that's a good idea?

Cheers,
Ben