[OpenFontLibrary] New Ubuntu Font

[Schrijver]

Thanks Liam

I agree I should be more specific. I was planning to look deeper into the usability of open source, do some blogging on the subject, sit up some discourse, for me it is important to bridge the design and the foss community…

I think the Open Font Library is a potential platform for that, since designers are naturally interested in type.
It is a chance to explore collaborative and distributed workflows.
I will attend LGM2010. Looking forward to it!

On commisioning etc…
I agree with Nicolas S

> The
> articulation of existing community-based open font projects and
> commissioned projects such as this one will probably be quite interesting...


Stimulating, one hopes :)

Regarding Garrick’s comments:

I think paying professionals could occur in all parts of the ecosystem… not just for creating original fonts…
I think net gains would be much higher if you also hired professionals to, instead of making just another font, work on the overall quality of existing free fonts. Kerning, hinting.
That is the whole idea of free software, no, that you can build on what has already been done?

But yeah I am looking forward to the new site.
I taught a web development class today, and when talking about web fonts, it was a shame I couldn”t show them the new OFLB

Good luck Dave this weekend!

Eric

Op 6 mrt 2010, om 18:59 heeft Liam R E Quin het volgende geschreven:

> On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 14:41 +0100, Schrijver wrote:
> 
>> I really do not like the look of the Vera Sans based fonts that are
>> now the default fonts on most Linux distros (if I’m not mistaken).
>> That is no fault of the Deja-vu teams, it is just that the original
>> design on which they are based I think is hugely unattractive :-(
> 
> It's subjective. :) For my part I'm happy with them. The font family
> is fairly suitable for use on the screen, and the designer, Jim Lyles,
> made some changes (e.g. making sure that o, O and 0 were clearly
> distinct, and 1/l/|), at our request...
> 
> A few years ago a group of us got together and said that we needed to
> have some high-quality fonts for GNOME - this got expanded to, "for the
> whole community".
> 
> Actually "dejaVu" is more common today, unfortunately. I say
> "unfortunately" because it's an extension, not by the original designer,
> to attempt to add complete Unicode coverage in one font -- but because
> of the philosophy of Unicode, you actually need multiple fonts in order
> to take "script" into account, and not only for Chinese/Japanese/Korean
> selection, but even for a-z0-9. So instead of writing programs that
> can assume a single font has everything they need, programs need to
> cope with a list of fonts in some environments.
> 
>>> It will be published under an open font
>>> license, and considered part of the trade dress of Ubuntu, which will
>>> limit its relevance for software interfaces outside of Ubuntu but
>> 
>> What do they mean by that?
> 
> It means that another Linux distribution might not be allowed to use the
> typeface as part of their branding or marketing, e.g. probably not as
> the default font for a desktop.
> 
>> It could represent a leap in the usability of linux for the desktop in
>> general, not just ubuntu 
> I doubt that :) There's no reason to suppose it will come out better (or
> worse) than Vera; Brian is an experienced type designer, although he's
> not Matthew Carter or Hermann Zapf :-) and so is Jim Lyles, but remember
> also Microsoft paid Monotype for over 100 person-years for the Windows
> 95 core fonts... (supposedly)
> 
> 
>> Though the whole Gnome interface could undergo some serious visual scrutiny imho
> It's getting that. Please send specific comments or positive suggestions
> to the usability list. The GNOME project is not part of Ubuntu,
> of course...
> 
> I've been waiting for OLFB to get to the point where it has previews and
> feels like something where a font design would be pleased to see their
> work before going back to the people who offered to donate fonts in the
> past and asking again. So that may happen this year too, which would be
> way cool.  On the other hand, the typographic support on the Free
> desktop is at the level proprietary software reached in the 1980s...
> a lot of applications don't even let you specify line spacing... so
> having more fonts is an essential and exciting part of a much bigger
> picture. Hence, for example, http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/
> 
> Liam
> 
> 
> -- 
> Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
> Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
> Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
>