[Openfontlibrary] Re: Free Design Software Community Roadmap

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 4/17/06, Raph Levien wrote:

> Ok, that sounds reasonable. But I'd still like to hear more detail on
> how much time individuals are going to be able to contribute.

Okay, I think that as a person who started OFL I should speak louder
and, actually, more often :)

My original idea was to have a complementation to OpenClipArt that
would both help having a decent repo of fonts in one place and help
creating a community of open source fonts designers.

If we lack web developers to do all that is planned, then we should
concentrate on community stuff: communication, docs, tutorials,
actually developing fonts together etc.

What I would like to avoid is having a crowd of newbies who know
basics only and do just simple stuff. And we don't want mediocre
fonts, right? Thus we need to find some ways to make an accent on
collaborative work, to let people know that it will be much better
having one polished font instead of 10 so-so. Having "i18n" teams of
font developers would be great as well, especially since support for
complex scripts is coming to Scribus Really Soon Now.

The latter is related to tutorial #1 "how to add glyphs to an existing
font". It's really important to know how to add e.g. cyrillic glyphs
to a latin only font, so that they would look consistent.

(Btw, here is one tutorial that explains how to add more typographics
spaces to an existing font using Fontforge:
http://www.heliosmulti.com/plaplo/?page_id=27)

As for web-based development, I'm not quite sure I fully understand
what is proposed. What you describe sounds pretty complicated, and
since we can't even have a working repository for so long, I would
prefer making more realistic plans. We have SVN set up and ready for
contributions. Any font designer can propose a font, request a branch
and start working on it.

Now, about time available to contribute. I'm basically a communication
type of guy. What I do best (except translating various open source
applications) is helping people work together, make standards,
promoting etc. Call it friendly management :) My job is technical
writing, I'm not a developer. I have a font to be finished (adding
latin glyphs and punctuation marks), and I'm planning to contribute to
some screen-optimized fonts later, when I have time.

Since I'm officially announcing linuxgraphics.ru in a week, you can
rely on me when it comes to publishing tutorials translated into
Russian and promoting OFL both as repo and font designers community
meeting place.

I can also start talking to authors of fonts that I recently added to
OFL wiki (http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/index.php/Current_PD/GPL_Fonts)

Alexandre