[Openfontlibrary] Some suggestions

[sascha brossmann]

On 12/8/05, Simos Xenitellis <simos74 at gmx.net> wrote:
JP>Aha...I need to familiarize myself with font standards more. Is there
JP>a way to include the license and any metadata in current font
JP>formats?

yes, there is. plenty of it, actually: there are standard header fields for
- creator
- creation date
- copyright
- trademark
- notice/description
- designer
- designer url
- vendor
- url
- license
- license url
- version
- truetype version record
- truetype vendor code
- font creation date
and several more.

> It is possible to include some text in the font headers, though it
> does not look good.

maybe we should have a little tool to read the font headers and display
the information. this could also be used to create the metadata for deb
and rpm packages from it. propably letterror's (just van rossum & erik
van blokland) fonttools [http://sourceforge.net/projects/fonttools/]
could be used for this purpose. i would also suggest to use the
fonttools-generated XML representation as a basis for versioning, so
diffs/patches need not be binary. see also
http://www.letterror.com/code/index.html for further font-processing
stuff.

> High quality fonts have different versions for Regular, Bold, Italics.
> These should be in the same package, as partial installations would
> have bad results.

ACK.

> It is good for the font designer to add some text such as describing
> the fonts, adding some contact information and so on.

ACK.

> Also, there are different versions of fonts. How do you signify
> updates? MyFont-3.ttf?

imho, the files should be named identically and the version should be
put in the respective fields in the header. you won't normally want to
install different versions of one font parallel, so identical filenames
ensure the users won't get into a mess.

best,

sascha brossmann
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