[LGM] some personal observations - day 2

[Gregory Pittman]

Thursday

Accessible Graphics on the Web - Amelia Bellamy-Royds
	This was not so much a how-to on the topic, but an introduction to the
developing guidelines for accessibility, considering the various issues
web users have, whether that be vision, hearing, or some other
impairment, but also language issues. There are particular problems with
graphics, such as how do you make them accessible to the visually impaired?

Designing websites with constraints using GSS - Carl Chouinard
	GSS is something of an intelligent CSS (not that CSS isn't
intelligent), or one might say adaptable. Rather than making hard
specifications for sizing and positioning of objects on a page,
constraints are set which depend on display size and relationship to
other objects on the page.

Creating realtime collaborative web applications with Derby.js and
Meteor.js - Eric Schrijver
	This is pretty impressive at least as far as the ability to do
collaborative editing in realtime. Perhaps we can hear from OSP in the
future about what sorts of creative work this provides the greatest
benefit of the realtime feature.

The State of Color Management - Chris Murphy
	Although one might think that by now the various OSes would have
implemented all they "should" be doing in regard to color management,
both on screen and in print, it turns out they haven't, so Chris
enlightened us on the good, bad, and ugly. Later he gave a lightning
talk to add comments about Android and iOS.

Pushing open source UX design - how we do it in ownCloud - Jan-Christoph
Borchardt
	If nothing else, Jan-Christoph showed us the benefit of incorporating
designers into a projects team, working with developers to make sure
that the public face of web sites and GUI of the software are both
pleasing to the eye and not so confusing to the users.

Natron: compositing with Blender integration - Alexandre Gauthier-Foichat
	A bit over my head, but Natron is an up and coming project for open
source video compositing, and progressing rapidly in its capabilities,
especially its interactions with Blender.

html2print - Stéphanie Vilayphiou,
	Anyone who tries to convert documents made for print publishing to html
or vice versa knows the major issues one immediately comes up against,
and we all know the limitations of PDFs on the web. OSP has decided to
tackle the task of transforming an html document to high quality
printable material, along the way dealing with font and the various
layout issues. The work they've done looks impressive.

Libre fonts for Tamil - (apologies for not having the name of the
substitute presenter)
	Worldwide, Tamil is an important language considering the numbers of
people who understand and use it. There are a number of issues with
creating fonts for Tamil, not the least of which is encouraging adoption
of new fonts by those who use them, in particular Tamil-language
newspapers. There seems to be various elements of cultural resistance to
adoption of new font styles which might solve problems like word-spacing
and the absence of a hyphenation framework.

Towards Open Textile and Garment Production - Hong Phuc Dang
	It's pretty safe to say that Hong Phuc caught fire with Susan Spencer's
presentations about open source garment design, and is working
strenuously to try to bring the idea of scaled-down garment production
to Asia. Currently this is dominated by large, high production
enterprises, but it seems that this will eventually change, based on
what she had to show us about recent developments.

SPECIMEN - designing fonts (hi)story(ies) - Loraine Furter
	SPECIMEN is a new web-based repository of information about fonts, not
just the data typically included in the font files, but also their
histories, such as what they may have been based on or where their
inspiration came from.

Stroke fonts - Colm O'Neill, Ludi Loiseau, Gijs de Heij, Pierre Huyghebaert
	More information about how OSP keeps expanding the number of ways and
the number tools it uses to develop fonts for particular purposes,
especially those that achieve for their clients some creative graphical
style beyond the transmission of textual information.

Thrilling Developments From the Field of Boring Font Utilities - Nathan
Willis
	This was a showpiece of Nate's creation of some tools for analysis of
various informational files associated with fonts, using some schemas he
created for Emacs. Also, a utility for building fonts for easy installation.

Goodbye FontForge - Dave Crossland
	A combination of personal odyssey in regard to font creation over the
years, along with his involvement with FontForge. Some new approaches to
font creation and editing were described, finally with some
demonstration of the new, still in development Metapolator, a web-based
font editor. The comments from the audience at the end highlighted
concern about Dave's "abandonment" of FontForge.

Greg