[OpenFontLibrary] FontConf - the unconference on @font-face and web fonts.

[Jon Phillips]

Very cool! It might be able to be arranged :)

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Garrick Van Buren <garrick at kernest.com> wrote:
> I'm organizing an unconference on web fonts & @font-face use - http://fontconf.com
>
> If you're passing through St. Paul, MN this summer - I'd love to have someone lead a session on the OFLB and the OFL (and related licenses).
>
> Details @ http://fontconf.com
>
> Thanks.
>
> -----------------------
> Garrick Van Buren
> 612 325 9110
> garrick at kernest.com
> -----------------------
> Kernest.com
> Free and Commercial Web Fonts
> -----------------------
>
> On Mar 10, 2010, at 10:56 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 05:00:57PM -0600, Barry Schwartz wrote:
>>> Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> skribis:
>>>> Well, things are changing now with the advent of LuaTeX, thanks to its
>>>> backward compatibility, it is taking slowly over TeX world (see ConTeXt
>>>> for example, which is being rewritten in Lua), unlike ANT which never
>>>> gained momentum.
>>>
>>> ANT, written almost entirely by one guy in an actual programming
>>> language, never gained momentum because people have had their minds
>>> numbed by TeX and glorified assembly languages. We have had issue
>>> after issue after issue of TUGboat, year after year, devoted to newer
>>> and more intricate ways to drive a nail with a sponge. The appeal is
>>> understandable; give me a chance to write in an assembly language,
>>> when I was still capable of such things, and I could get lost in
>>> it. Even fontforge is written in a mere glorified assembly language
>>> that is the main reason the program crashes, crashes, crashes, because
>>> the compiler is happy to compile stupid things that an OCaml compiler
>>> would never come close to accepting and which no one should have to
>>> worry about in 2010 in an application.
>>
>> I was not saying ANT is not good (well, I know no OCmal anyway), I'm
>> just saying that in a very conservative world like TeX, if you don't
>> maintain some level of backward compatibility (LuaTeX isn't fully
>> backward compatible), people will not adopt your engine.
>>
>> BTW, AFAIU, Knuth didn't want to have a programing language in TeX; the
>> macros was intended for users designing the layout of their books, every
>> one was expected to write their own extended TeX engine in pascal, but
>> nobody did :)
>>
>>> This is all kind of off-topic, but it is too easy to get sucked into
>>> bit twiddling. Bit twiddling is a curse on mankind. OFLB can have all
>>> kinds of bells and whistles, but some graphic design and an effort to
>>> appeal to actual, non-TeXie font-users have made League of Moveable
>>> Type a more productive place to post fonts, from my point of view
>>> wherein, frankly, TeXies can be taken for granted. They'll use
>>> anything capable of doing text, even if it is buried under three
>>> layers of tarballing in an ftp directory on an obscure host.
>>>
>>> :)
>>
>> Back to the main point, lets just hope OFLB v2 will ever be online, then
>> we can discuss all sorts of improving it, but I don't think it makes any
>> sense right now.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Khaled
>>
>> --
>> Khaled Hosny
>> Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
>> Free font developer
>
>



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Jon Phillips
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