[Openfontlibrary] Some suggestions

[Jon Phillips]

On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 16:26 +0100, sascha brossmann wrote:
> 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

All great thoughts! Could you please add where you see fit to the Open
Font Library wiki: http://www.openfontlibrary.org/wiki

Jon


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