[Openfontlibrary] library philosophy (was: new release of the Ubuntu titling font)

[Dave Crossland]

On 03 Jan 2008 11:42:54 -0800, George Williams <gww at silcom.com> wrote:
>
> A year and a half since its inception, the openfontlibrary still does
> not look to me as though it were designed with fonts in mind. I find
> this distressing.

Well... The domain was registered, hosting was set up, ccHost and a
wiki and a mailman list were installed, and here we are, not much
different from 18 months ago.

But, so? We are a tiny community with a wide set of skills that don't
much overlap, and no one has tended to it.

Here's what happened for me AIUI:

12 months ago I thought that OFLB ought to be a custom revision
control and font display webapp, and when I visited Raph 9 months ago
we discussed Django and Trac as useful starting points to build on.
Raph was keen that it be a font editor web app too, and spent a day
hacking up fontly.com/sandbox/spiro.html - a small marvel :-)

I haven't worked on myself or funded such work for 2 reasons: First, I
decided to learn typeface design before web app development since
plenty of people know web app development and not many know typeface
design, so I have done nothing towards  learning web app development
past the tiny handful I learned a few years ago.

Second, I heard that Creative Commons was going to (and has) funded a
team of people to work on ccHost, and so I figured ccHost is a good
short term webapp for OFLB; it exists today and whatever is written in
the future can target its APIs.

In 2007 we have two OFLB-specific ccHost API bindings:

* Nicolas did some great work making a OFL module for ccHost so that
fonts uploaded to the OFLB that are under OFL could be marked as such.

* George did some great work making FontForge upload to ccHost sites
(OFLB hardcoded) directly from its "Generate Font" dialog.

I believe ccHost is developing into a decent revision control webapp.
When the next major version is released, I hope to spend some time
deploying it for the Open Font Library appropriately.

There is some simple web-design-ish reconfiguring to make the site
look better and welcome new users better. If anyone hasn't taken a
recent look at http://openclipart.org/ - the premier deployment of
ccHost for visual media (clip art made in SVG) - that shows what
ccHost can look like if its well tended to.

I'll forward your email to the ccHost list and see what they say :-)

https://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/cctools-cchost

-- 
Regards,
Dave