[OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 11:38:43PM +0100, Christoph Schäfer wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, 10. März 2010 22:56:54 schrieb Khaled Hosny:
> > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 12:51:51PM -0600, Barry Schwartz wrote:
> > > 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 do understand this. But upstream developers are just not interested (a
> > patch to implement proper, TeX-like, H&J for Pango have been ignored for
> > years, all requests and offers to help implementing OpenType support for
> > Scribus have been ignored, etc.) and I don't see this changing.
> >
> 
> With all due respect: Can you substantiate this assertion? I didn't find a 
> single message from you to one of the Scribus MLs regarding the issue 
> (although I may have overlooked it).

I did (I'm not sure was it on IRC or on mailing list, it was like 3
years ago), I was even asked to provide some sort of test suit that I
sent, but my mails went unanswered, IIRC. And after all years, the
situation is the same; every time one asks about Arabic (or Indic, or
even OpenType for LGC scripts), we get a "we will do it after X release"
answer, where X kept changing.

Even if I didn't, it is not like we are talking about some obscure
feature Scribus is lacking, we are talking about a DTP system that can't
do any sort of proper text layout, no ligatures, no small caps no proper
(i.e. that actually work) H&J, I'm not even talking about the complete
lack of any non-LGC support, fine typographic control, or even lack of
other fundamental features like footnotes!

What is the point of starting yet another useless discussion if Scribus
team shows no interest in such fundamental features, the fact that they
ever released such a deficient application is ridicules, even
handicapped tools like troff does better. It is like releasing a paint
program where you can only do ASCII art, but it does support RGB, CMYK,
color profiles and importing/exporting two dozens of image file formats.

In contrast, the archaic, +25 years old TeX is able to cope with modern
technology, and have people who do actually care about typography. Last
month I was able to convince ConTeXt developer to implement support for
OpenType Optical margins (opbd) feature, though there isn't any font
that implement it (or any other system, free or proprietary, that
support it), but I need it for my Arabic fonts, and it take a few mail
exchanges to get it.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer