[OpenFontLibrary] Design service blog

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le dimanche 16 novembre 2008 à 18:10 +0100, Jeremy Schorderet a écrit :
> hi all

Hi Jeremy

> i put up a blog 2 weeks ago to open discussions on my semester project.
> (the creation of an original typeface for the open font library)

Quite honestly if you insist on posting about a blog without giving its
address I doubt you'll get much feedback.

> i haven't had much feedback…
> but that's why it is online! and that's also why i adressed to you  
> people.
> 
> take a look and share thoughts / references…

I'd say we've all seen fonts that never went past ASCII support and are
therefore mightily useless for most people in the world (since even most
latin scripts need more than just ASCII, English is pretty much an
exception). The lack of feedback is probably the indifference/horror
most of us feel towards creating one other such font (we don't expect
you to create much more in a semester).

If you want to make a difference do select an *existing* font and work
with its author to expand in coverage. For example, take one promising
font and make it MES-1/2/3 compliant

http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/mes-2-rationale.html

Examples of fonts to complete would be
— Edrip ftp://ftp.dvo.ru/pub/Font/edrip/
— Heuristica ftp://ftp.dvo.ru/pub/Font/heuristica/

Or if you're feeling ambitious
– DejaVu http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/
— Liberation https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/

But you can pretty much take any ASCII-limited font and make it useful
for *many* other people just by incresing its coverage.
(but do remember to get native speakers as reviewers of your glyphs,
posting to relevant translation groups should find you some)

If you want to make something totaly new, create a latin-arabic font in
fontorge using BASE tables. I hear the pango maintainer would love an
example of such a font to start implementing base support.
http://www.microsoft.com/OpenType/OTSpec/BASE.htm

> (it sucks to be asking though)

Well sometimes you get the answers you want, sometimes you get the
answers you don't want, sometimes you get nothing. That's real-world
human interactions for you, school is about the only place where you're
guaranteed answers in time.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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