[Openfontlibrary] new release of the Ubuntu titling font

[Ben Laenen]

On Thursday 03 January 2008, George Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 19:03, Dave Crossland wrote:
> > FontLab VFBs are _not_ free formats. There are two I know of, UFO
> > and SFD.
>
> There are also ttf, otf, pfb, etc.

The issues I have with these formats:

* UFO: doesn't seem up to the task to keep all necessery information in 
the font (ttf hinting for example). Could be extended since it's all 
xml, but not exactly straight forward and would mean changing the 
programs. And it doesn't have the OpenType information.

* TTF, OTF: binary formats, cannot be used for collaborative development 
where people send in patches and use a central. Also, we often get the 
fonts in TTF format, where something like the original source could be 
very useful as well, since with TTF we only get the quadratic curves, 
while they were designed with cubic curves (sure, convertors exist, but 
they have small errors).

* SFD: the most useful one so far (and the only one we can use with 
DejaVu), but SFDs have too much garbage in them that shouldn't be there 
(the things we need to strip out in DejaVu before committing to svn), 
like how you left your windows in FontForge. I also personally don't 
like how ttf hinting is kept in binary form instead of being written 
out completely (but some meta-hinting language would be even 
greater :-p).

But I guess the best format doesn't exist, since the requirement for 
different kind of fonts is so different...

Greetings
Ben