[OpenFontLibrary] Fontaine Announcement

[Ed Trager]

* ANNOUNCING FONTAINE *

Hi, everyone,

Fontaine is a command-line utility that displays key meta information
about font files, including but not limited to font name, style,
weight, glyph count, character count, copyright, license information
and orthographic coverage.  The software is released under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) v. 2  or any later version.

I am writing this software initially for use with the Open Font
Library project (OFLB).  The OFLB project is still "in the works" and
as a result it is accurate to say that Fontaine is also still "in the
works".  Nevertheless, I believe that Fontaine will have application
outside of the OFLB project.

In order to meet various possible application needs, Fontaine has the
ability to produce reports in JSON, XML, XHTML, and TEXT formats.

I have created a web page documenting Fontaine on Unifont.org:

     http://www.unifont.org/fontaine/

I have also created a Sourceforge.net project for Fontaine:

      http://sourceforge.net/projects/fontaine/

... and the source code is available for checkout from SVN:

     svn co https://fontaine.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fontaine

I plan to create an interactive web page which will demonstrate how
Fontaine works.  However I haven't got quite that far yet.

The software uses a CMAKE-based build system and is known to work on
Linux and OSX.  It has not yet been extensively tested on other
platforms.

Some features which will be needed for the OFLB site are still missing
and implementing those features will take priority.  Help on
completing, vetting, and expanding the orthography data files will be
especially welcome.  An initial list of known bugs is shown on the
unifont.org/fontaine web page. Suggestions for further improvement and
patches for bug fixes are welcome.

Note that in many cases Fontaine reports on entire "orthography
groups" (such as "Western European", "Central European", "Pan African
Latin", etc.) rather than on individual languages the way that
software like FontConfig does.  The orthography work I have done for
Fontaine has required striking a careful balance between opposing
forces -- simplicity and generality versus specificity. At the
extremes, there are "pervasively adopted" scripts (like Latin) and
"singularly adopted" scripts (like Japanese).  Those opposing forces
operate differently on different scripts, especially at the extremes
of the continuum. Fontaine thus uses its own set of orthography files
in order to provide reports in ways that are, to the best of my
abilities, most meaningful in the context of fonts.  Fontaine is new,
so certainly the jury is still out regarding whether I have made the
right decisions here, but I thought this especially worth mentioning
given the recent and very laudable work on orthography files in
FontConfig.

Best Wishes -- Ed Trager