[OpenFontLibrary] GPL fonts! (Was: Open Font Library submissions)

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le lundi 10 novembre 2008 à 16:33 +0000, Dave Crossland a écrit :
>> 2008/11/10 James Weiner <james at weareculture.com>:
>>> Are there no font formats that can carry easily accessible meta data like
>>> ID3 does for mp3s etc?
>> TrueType and OpenType do this easily enough; the problem is getting
>> users to put the metadata there.
> 
> And keep it up to date / accurate
> 
> Even when there is info in font metadata we often can not trust it
> because it has been wrong so many times before.
> 
> Countless fonts say they're at version 1.0 even when we see them revised
> many times.
> 
> Countless fonts make incomplete of plain false licensing statements in
> their metadata (Google Droid is just the last high-visibility example).
> 
> I'll take a detached license file and a versionned archive any day in
> the stead of their metadata equivallents. One can be trusted the other —
> not.

Instead of throwing away the whole thing because some designers ignore
it or make mistakes, we should really take advantage of a metadata
approach: indicate inconsistencies in the metadata to upstreams (with
regular reviews like the one done by the Debian fonts team), explain why
it's problematic (hey, it can even be done without being aggressive!
Imagine that: explaining in a friendly way that it's in their own
advantage to describe what they intend!) and continue encouraging best
practises, providing templates and building them into both the design
toolkit and the hosting library to make it easier for designers to DTRT.
Fontforge's recently introduced FONTLOG feature and all the progress
made with the OFLB redesign are very good examples of that approach I
think. We're on the right track.

BTW, there are efforts underway to expose more of that metadata: in the
fontconfig cache, in the font viewers themselves, in font managers like
fontmatrix, in the DOM of browsers, hopefully in the font menu itself
someday. IMHO the more visible the metadata becomes the more font
designers will pay attention.

Also a detached license file can more easily be dropped when
conveying/redistributing the font (illegal but some people an not aware/
forget) whereas if it's in the metadata it will be still be there.

As for lack of versioned archives, and the possible discrepancies
between internal version and documentation version, well another aspect
of the best practises forming in our growing community will take care of
that.

I can understand that metadata seems much less important to designers
compared to the actual work of glyph drawing and script engineering...
It's up to OFLB moderators and packagers to draw attention to its
importance, help authors realize it can be a real blocker and help them
make sure the metadata is consistent.


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
http://planet.open-fonts.org


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