[OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB

[Barry Schwartz]

Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> skribis:
> But how OFLB is going to fix this, I don't think you are suggesting that
> we (OFLB community, whatever it means) rewrite most of free software
> text layout stack (and funny "DTP" applications) to support advanced
> typography. So, I think you mean writing smaller applications that are
> are able to really utilize our free fonts, but I then fail to see what
> is the use of such applications if can fit in a larger ecosystem and
> work flow?

That would not be the way to go. If it is going to be done at all it
has to be by getting other projects to fix their stuff in exchange for
synergistic bundling. Right now it is as if we had a Firefox with
mostly non-functional add-on support, along with a handful of sites to
which Firefox didn't link that offered add-ons that depended on
Firefox features that always crashed.

> I, myself, gave up and switched to TeX world, though weired and archaic
> it seems, they at least have some clue on what good typography is.

TeX has wasted more person-years than I can imagine. Making it
possible to write actual programs in TeX was an astounding mistake,
which is responsible for LaTeX3 and for an almost total lack of
advancement for decades. All the time that has gone into LaTeX3 (if
not LaTeX itself) should have been spent on writing new stuff in real
programming languages, the way ANT came about. Imagine where we could
have been by now.