[Openfontlibrary] Some suggestions

[Simos Xenitellis]

Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

>On 12/9/05, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Also, there are different versions of fonts. How do you signify updates?
>>MyFont-3.ttf?
>>    
>>
>
>Possible, though I'd prefer usual *nix versioning
>
>Btw, what do you think about SVN + .SFD (FontForge project file
>format)? Each version would have a unique number of its revision then.
>  
>
Personally I would be more comfortable with a standard versioning scheme:
<1 if the font is not complete
1.0 for first complete version, and in the package it should describe 
what complete means (coverage, etc)
1.x for subsequent versions.

If the font has a suitable license and gets accepted to Debian, for 
example, it will acquire a name of the form
ttf-myfont
The actually package could be ttf-myfont.1.0.zip (or 7z, or tar.gz)
If the package contains source as well, it could be ttf-myfont-1.0.src.zip

It would be good to mention the coverage of a font per Unicode ranges 
(http://www.unicode.org/charts/).
I believe Alan Wood uses a tool to scan automatically the available 
Unicode ranges in the font.
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html
The categorisation there is quite good.
You can "automatically" create PNG files with font samples using tools 
like LASi++
http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/
so the end-user can have a good understand of what a font can or cannot 
do, as in
http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/

Of course, the above are just descriptions. The full credit will go to 
the people that will actually implement.

Simos Xenitellis
http://simos.info/blog/