[OpenFontLibrary] Font previewer requirements

[Ed Trager]

Hi, all,

OK, I'll try to clarify ...

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 10:47 PM,  <Fontfreedom at aol.com> wrote:
>>> A good static previewer:
>>
>>Ed Trager's upcoming "Fontaine" ought to be helpful here :-)
>
> Does that have a webpage?
>

There are a number of different programs being developed for the the
OFLB web site:

FONTAINE:
-------------

This is a new program I'm writing initially for the OFLB project.  The
software is getting close to a releasable stage, but I haven't
released it yet.  The primary license will be GPL v. 2.0 or any later
version.  I am thinking of creating a SourceForge project for SVN
hosting of fontaine, but I haven't got that far yet.

Fontaine is a command-line utility that displays key meta information
about font files, including but not limited to font name, style,
weight, glyph count, character count, copyright, license information
and orthographic coverage.

Much effort has gone into reporting orthographic coverage categories
that are meaningful to people without requiring that users have
intimate familiarity with all of the jargon of ISO standards and
Unicode coverage blocks.

To facilitate different usage scenarios, fontaine produces reports in
JSON (default), XML, XHTML, and TEXT formats.  In the code, there is a
base "MLR" ("markup language report") class from which specific
reporting classes like JSON and XML are derived.  This architecture
should make it easy to create additional report formats if needed.

Fontaine's orthography database includes "sample sentences" and
"sample characters" for each orthography. For many orthographies, the
"sample sentence" (or sometimes more than one sentence) is actually a
pangram.  However, since many orthographies, such as Chinese and
Japanese, don't support "pangrams" per se, I just use the more general
term "sample sentence" which works across all orthographies.  I
provide instances of pangrams for those orthographies where I have
been able to locate them.  Future community contributions will
certainly be valuable in expanding and vetting the orthography data
that I have compiled so far.

The plan is that report output from  Fontaine can be used as input to
generate a font preview image.  The font preview image can be
generated from one or more of the sample sentences (pangrams) or
sample character strings provided by fontaine. A separate program
--such as PCFP (below)-- is used to create the preview graphic.

I am still thinking about how this last step should best be handled.
At issue is the fact that most of the good modern Open Source fonts
provide coverage for a number of different orthographic categories.
For example, a font like SIL's Gentium covers many different Latin
orthographies (incl. but not limited to Western Latin, Central
European, Turkish, and Vietnamese), plus both monotonic and polytonic
Greek, plus Cyrillic, and more.  So how do you choose one
representative pangram or sample character string for use as the
default static font preview ?

PCFP
------

"pcfp" stands for "Pango-Cairo Font Playground".  Pcfp is a simple
command-line utility I wrote to take a font specification and a text
string on the command line and render the text in the specified font
to a PNG (portable networks graphics) canvas.  The dynamic font
previewer currently on http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/ uses pcfp on
the server.  One significant advantage of pcfp is that complex scripts
like Arabic and Devanagari are rendered correctly -- because of Pango
of course.  Pcfp is released under GPL v.2.0 or any later version.

"Font Playground" and "Key Curry"
-------------------------------------------

A browser-based dynamic font previewer requires an AJAX-based
Javascript program on the client side.

For the OFLB project, I developed a new version of the "Font
Playground" virtual typesetter to interact with pcfp on the server.

I also developed the "Key Curry"  Javascript program to provide
"virtual keyboard" services so that users would be able to easily type
a wider range of scripts and Unicode characters than normally provided
on typical desktop computers.

I am still thinking about the exact licensing strategy for "Font
Playground" and "Key Curry".  These Javascript programs use "Gladiator
Components" (GC) -- a Javascript AJAX and GUI framework that I and a
colleague of mine developed.  It is almost certain that we will employ
a dual-licensing strategy for the GC Javascript components -- an Open
Source community license for non-profit web sites, and a commercial
license for commercial web sites.

This is why --if you read the fine print-- it says "The Font
Playground typesetter and KeyCurry virtual keyboard were built using
Gladiator Components and are copyright (c) 2008 by Edward H. TRAGER.
Direct inquiries for use to ed dot trager at gmail dot com."  You can
basically translate this as "Ed has not yet decided on the licensing
model for these Javascript components."  I will resolve these
questions by the time the new OFLB site is really ready for launching.

Best - Ed


>
> I sent Ed an email a couple of days ago asking if I could use his font
> previewer, no replies yet.
>
>
> FF
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