[OpenFontLibrary] Phone conversation with Ed Trager

Dave Crossland dave at lab6.com
Sun Mar 7 12:02:10 PST 2010


Hi!

Today I made a phonecall to Ed Trager to catch up and discuss the
project. Here are my notes from the talk:

Dave explained why the site is being held up - that there are 4 people
with SSH access to the new server (me, Ben Weiner, Jon Philips, and Ed
Trager) and of them, I am the most free, and I haven't done the work
of getting ccHost 5 running with the theme Ben and Aaron made and the
font preview program Ed made. Once this is done, the next step will be
to consider what to replace ccHost with. Jon has been involved with
the creation of aikiframework.org (NOT a wiki framework!) that has
just gone live for openclipart.org and this could well be a contender.

Ed thinks about replacing ccHost with a custom webapp. The most needed
feature is managing the fonts; thats 1 sql table for where the fonts
are on disk, and their metadata. Then another feature for font
authors/editors, with an OpenID backend so its just tracking who is an
editor for what files. The web design and the important system
architecture can be reused from Ben Weiner's work on ccHost. Ed is
using Drupal for other projects.

Dave thought that whatever it is, it must be RESTful for integration
with FF and so on. The feature he would think of when looking at
suitability is, how easy it will be to implement a user viewing a
font, downloading it, modifying on their computer, and then uploading
v1.1 with some glyphs changed and some new ones added, as a fork of
the original. ccHost supports this, albeit not very well. And then,
crucially, the feature would be extended to support the original's
author to merge these patches into their trunk. This could be with
Aiki or anything custom with a DVCS file store - web.py and django
were my immediate thoughts.

Ed is very happy with his latest "Font Playground" program, which is a
jQuery plugin. He recently met a Nigerian guy in Michigan who has
difficulty with the keyboard input for the Nigerian language (a latin
variant). With the jQuery framework it is easy for Ed to implement
this layout.

The next feature Ed plans to add to the playground is using browser
feature detection to transparently switch from PNG font rendering to
@font-face rendering as used in http://www.oep-h.com/LOF/ (also qith
jQuery!). I am happy to support this.

Dave suggested the end result of Open Font Library ought to be an
online collaborative font editor. http://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/
shows great promise in that direction, if we can do the system
architecture for the collaborative and font specific aspects - Ed
mentioned that the http://wenq.org/ font project already has such an
online font editor, eg http://wenq.org/index.cgi?Canvas#U251F8

Cheers
Dave


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