[OpenFontLibrary] Fontaine

[Ed Trager]

Hi, Dwayne,

OK, I added Venda (South Africa) orthography to Fontaine:

==============
svn ci -m "Added Venda (South Africa) and Igbo Onwu (Nigeria) orthographies"
Sending        trunk/src/FontFace.cpp
Adding         trunk/src/orthographies/IgboOnwu.h
Adding         trunk/src/orthographies/Venda.h
Sending        trunk/src/orthographies/orthographies.h
Transmitting file data ....
Committed revision 34.
==============

While I was at it, I added Igbo Onwu (Nigeria) to Fontaine also.  I've
been working on a Javascript-based Igbo keyboard, so that was easy to
do -- Maybe I will make a Venda keyboard next?

The idea of adding a "--orthography=XXX,YYY,ZZZ" option is a good one.
 I needed just that functionality yesterday in fact!  Of course there
already exist the "fontconfig" tools, ie.. "fc-list" -- but I don't
suppose that Fontconfig includes Venda or other African orthographies?
 You could submit patches to fontconfig though.

As for Fontaine, adding orthographies that are specific to individual
languages (such as Venda and Igbo) as opposed to larger orthography
groups (such as my "PanAfrican" group in Fontaine) does raise issues
about the future design of Fontaine that I have not yet considered
fully :  The main issue is not to create endlessly long reports when
those are not needed.  I'll have to think about this more ...

Best - Ed


On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Dave Crossland<dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> Hi Dwayne!
>
> 2009/8/28 Dwayne Bailey <dwayne at translate.org.za>:
>> Fontaine is a Wonderful Tool(TM) :)
>
> Thanks! Its all Ed Trager's hard work though! I expect you'll know his
> website, unifont.org
>
> Ed, I met Dwayne at the Open Translation Tools 2007 conference in
> Croatia and he works at www.translate.org.za who are famous for
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pootle among other good works to help
> FOSS in South Africa :-)
>
>> I just completed a build and added Venda support.  It works great and
>> I've been checking South African coverage for free fonts.
>
> Wonderful - I hope you can submit your patch to Ed :-)
>
>> Do I send feature requests to you?
>
> Ed, is there a publish roadmap document that users can comment/add to? :-)
>
>> While the output is great I mostly
>> want to be able to check that a font has support for South African
>> languages.  So the ability to limit the request to only report coverage
>> for certain orthographies e.g.
>> --orthography='Basic Latin;Venda;Afrikaans'
>> That way I just see what I need to evaluate quickly.
>
> That seems like a good feature to add :-)
>
>> Did I say this was a great tool!  When you said sponsor is that through
>> your font business?
>
> Essentially Ed's development has been on a volunteer basis, and I've
> been giving him donations from my business' expense account with money
> I earned doing systems administration work. I haven't yet got a
> business running around fonts, and I have some more family stuff to
> take care of the next few months.... But I do plan to hit the font
> stuff once I am free :-)
>
> Hope you are well and enjoying the winter/summer :-)
>
> Dave
>