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

[Nicolas Spalinger]

>> with split copyright notices, reserved names
>> lines and links to license and FAQ that the OFL provides in its header.
>> There is also a richer header template for separate source files on
>> http://oflb.open-fonts.org/OFL-1.1-header.txt
> 
> Yes, I hadn't looked through all the resources at oflb.open-fonts.org
> properly yet, and having a recommended template is a great idea :-)

Thanks. It's all part of the efforts to make it as readable and friendly
to designers as possible so they can focus on the actual designing :-)

> "human-readable headers" doesn't mean anything to me, and I would have
> thought it was some obscure jargon for "machine-readable metadata
> fields"...

The intent was human-readable as opposed to machine-readable. Places in
non-opaque formats where such a text paragraph could be put and
accessible by users. Basically we wrote that clause to encompass the
copyright notice/licensing statement stored in the TTF fields, in
separate README/COPYING kind of files or within text-based source
formats. This clause is designed to be future-proof and also take into
account future formats that would be text-based.

> When you say "the OFL provides in its header" do you mean,
> more precisely, "the OFL provides in its preamble"?

Actually the few lines at the top of the file with the copyright notice
and the license statement placeholders.

> Okay, I actually just ended up hacking up the whole thing. Here's a
> breakdown of my reasoning
> 
>> This file is part of <nameoffont> and is for <description>.
> 
> I'm not sure about the usage suggestion, and I think using <> is
> error-prone because lots of text processing systems don't display, or
> even delete, stuff that appears to be HTML tags to stop spam. So using
> programmers $ prefix with underscores for spaces seems better to me.

Mmm, you'd expect that these <> placeholders are replaced (and so not
there anymore) when they are used in a actual font release. I don't
think these is likely to cause many problems...

> Of course, type designers won't easily understand either <> or $_ so a
> "mickey mouse" version should also be available. I've appended both.

Yes, the idea of a corresponding template with Foo/Acme instead of
<placeholder> is certainly a useful one. Although we want to keep it as
short as possible.

[snip]

> Perhaps we should draft this on the wiki.... The discussion page of
> http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Font_metadata? :)

Sounds good.


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


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