[Openfontlibrary] Free Font Movement and Arabic Type Technology

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Roozbeh!

I'm on the committee of UKTUG, and involved in the emerging Free Font Movement.

Since I hear you're a long time GNU and TeX contributor, I'll skip the
"free as in freedom" thing and assume you can work out what I mean by
that phrase :-) However, the key moments in the movement so far, IMO,
are:

* Free Software for graphic design has become viable - with GIMP for
photography, Inkscape for illustration and Scribus for typography -
and is maturing rapidly.

* Earlier this year the www.libregraphicsmeeting.org was a great
success at bringing together all the Free Graphic Design Software
projects under one roof. The headlining event was the GPL release of
Xara LX.

* The SIL Open Font License (OFL) is a Free Software license written
specifically for marrying the needs of typeface designers and free
software advocates.

* SIL Graphite provides rendering capabilities for complex non-Roman
writing systems on the Free Desktop

* The Inkscape team's www.openclipartlibrary.org has inspired
www.openfontlibrary.org (OFLB) and while in its early stages, the
mailing list has been lively this month and the project's potential is
growing.

* Last month Ellen Lupton presented some of the Free Font Movement to
the ATypI annual conference in Lisbon

* Raph Levien is writing some innovative type technology that he'll
start publishing next year

During discussion of Raph's new tools [0] on the OFLB mailing list [1]
the subject of creating support for scripts not previously well
supported by computers came up. Karl Berry suggested you might be
interested, and so I thought I'd drop you a line to

A. Let you know what was happening as it might be of general interest

and

B. Invite you to join the discussion! :-)

[0]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/2006-October/000191.html
[1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary

-- 
Regards,
Dav