[Openfontlibrary] Re: Font site wishlist

[Pedro Amado]

Raph: 
What do you mean by "I'm going to be implementing my own font format in the
coming year or two" - Don't you think it would be better to team up and
develop the open font format UFO? I'm not really up to speed with UFO's tech
specs but I think it is based on an XML standards and, as Dave said "there
is a lot of exciting potential for innovation when you have freedom thats
impossible for proprietary foundries to match"

If the UFO is developed into a (more?) usable sharing standard who knows
maybe someone could build some sort of versioning system/wiki that only
requires the XML to build and track the changes of a font - being XML it can
easily be translated and interpreted by php or java.

I don't know how the sfd works but the fact that you can use robofab to
import/export UFO data to/from fontlab is great... maybe this can also be
implemented on Fontforge natively by means of the API.

As you've said "maintain the glyphs as separate database entries, and then
there would be code that can split a font into individual glyphs, and
assemble them back together into a font. This is pretty simple with sfd, and
I'm sure not hard with ufo either." 

Finally I agree with you - please don't build the version control into the
apps. Use an external tool or an app module extension. Preferably an open
standard that is web-friendly (W3C compliant - thinking in the future...?)
This way changing just one glyph could easily be translated (on the online
version control) into a minor change/branch of the original font file
originating something like version number 3.247 (x. being something like
full charsets changes and the .xxx glyph changes) leaving only kerning
spacing, hinting infos to deal with... only... ;)


BTW Dave:
Thanks for the heads up on Typeforge. I'd already contacted my host provider
and they're upgrading my account so more bandwidth can be used monthly...
(don't know what's taking so long) I think it's fruit of some unexpected
publicity in Ellen Lupton's Free Font Manifesto -
http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html

Cheers,
Pedro