[Openfontlibrary] FOSS and the Commercial Print World

[Ed Trager]

Hi, Jon,

>
> I would recommend if this interests anyone, that we should try to
> consolidate resources with other projects. Ideally though we need to get
> thumbnailing code to work and have more services sorted so that we could
> absorb pre-existing projects :)
>
> Oh, one thought we could do is allow for people to create their own font
> thumbnails when they submit their font. ccHost allows this at present.
> Obviously this is not ideal, but is doable right now.
>
> Would anyone like to help wit this immediate step? I think 128 px x 128
> px would be ideal for a quick thumbnail. Then, you can upload to your
> previous uploads and any bitmap will show up as a thumbnail...cool?
>

What do you mean by 128px X 128px square thumbnails?  How does that
make sense for a font preview?  Surely a rectangle that is wider than
it is tall is the most natural shape for a Western font preview
thumbnail, no?

I just took a look at the openfontlibrary.org site and, to be honest,
this site is really is not there yet ...

Just one clear example : when I click on one of the fonts such as
"Hopfer Hornbook" , the page displays the font preview as a 120px X
120px square -- even though the actual bitmap is really 364px X 180px!
 The actual 364x180 size makes a lot more sense.  The
non-isometrically scrunched-up previews on the current site look so
completely amateurish, it is ridiculous.  This is supposed to be a
premier site for Open Fonts?

My recommendation would be to FIRST create some really good and
attractive infrastructure so that OFLB looks like an attractive
repository where typographers might actually want to put their fonts.
This is not the case at all currently.

Besides decent font previews, OFLB needs to take a hint from the best
commercial font sites.  For example --and this is just a completely
random example that I clicked on to illustrate my point-- please take
a look at http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/kennethwoodruff/sonopa/ :

(1) Notice first that there is the name of the font and also a "Design
Credits" section.  For a premier Open Font site, I would actually
recommend that the "Design Credits" appear right at the top, next to
or below the font name itself.  People like to be recognized for their
artistic work.  On the current OFLB site for Hopfer Hornbook, for
example, it says it is "by: liftarn" and "featuring: Daniel Hopfer" --
Does this mean liftarn is the author of the font, or just the guy who
uploaded it to the site?  I'm confused.  It appears to have been based
on letter forms by the historical Daniel Hopfer.  So why not just say
something like that to make it very clear, i.e.:

   Design Credits :  This font by <John Doe> is based on letterforms
by Daniel Hopfer ((circa 1470-1536).

... that would be better and much more professional.

(2) Getting back to the Sonopa font example on Myfonts.com, the second
item under the name of the font is something that I really like in
principle :  a series of little icons that let me know instantly that
this font has the basic Latin letter set [Az], a set of extended Latin
too [àä], a matching Euro sign (and probably this means other currency
symbols too?) [€], an icon indicating the presence of common
typographical ligatures [ff], and so on.  This concise information is
very useful.  The OFLB site should absolutely have some way of
indicating glyph and Unicode block coverage in a font -- either with
icons or in some other way.

(3) The preview image --which all of you who have ever looked at
Myfonts.com before will notice is interactively tied to a little "Type
your text here" input box .  Whenever you type in your own text, all
of the little previews automagically change to display your text.
This is of course driven by an AJAX XmlHttpRequest engine.  For a site
like OFLB, we can easily imagine setting up exactly this kind of thing
using AJAX on the front end and, for the time being, PHP and libGD on
the back end.  Astute readers of this list may remember that I have
previously pointed out a serious limitation of the current libGD
library -- because it uses only FreeType2 and not Pango, layout of
ComplexTextLayout (CTL) scripts is not possible.  Probably a number of
OpenType features, like "ff" ligature substitution are also not
possible.  Nevertheless, a basic PHP+libGD backend on the server would
still be an excellent place to start and would serve Western font
needs fairly well.  Also, it is my understanding that the new libGD
maintainers are looking into adding Pango support to GD.  So choosing
libGD may provide a good upgrade path toward CTL script and eventually
advanced OpenType presentation (as the HarfBuzz library in Pango
matures) in the future too.

(4) After that cool interactive font preview on MyFonts.com, notice
there is also a "Gallery Images" : click on this and you get to see an
extended PDF "proof sheet".  Now this is professional typography!  It
is worth noting that some of the best FLOSS font projects already
provide PDF proof sheets : the Libertine Open Font project
(http://linuxlibertine.sourceforge.net/) and Gentium
(http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium_samples)
are premier examples that set the standard.  When people contact me to
have their fonts included on unifont.org, I now routinely recommend
that they need to have extended font previews --either as images or as
PDFs -- on their font sites.

So, in my mind, what OFLB should do is provide a set of guidelines for
people who want to upload their fonts to this repository: "You must
provide a) Font name and complete authorship and design credits
information in such-and-such a format, b) Clear license information in
such-and-such a format c) A font preview of such-and-such a size, d)
Font glyph and Unicode block coverage information in such-and-such a
format, d) At least one proof sheet in such-and-such PDF format ... "

If OFLB *first* provides good supporting infrastructure and a serious
set of guidelines which clearly show the professional nature of the
site, then I think the professional and aspiring amateur typographers
alike may find OFLB interesting. Over time, people will then naturally
want to put their fonts up on OFLB.  Until you do that, however, I
think you really have nothing.


Just my opinion -- Ed Trager