[OpenFontLibrary] Status report about the new OFLB

[Dave Crossland]

Hi All,

Progress on migrating OFLB to the new site has been delayed by (a)
moving to a new virtual server host thank to OSUOSL.org and (b) not
yet having the font list - http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/files -
working well. I hope both these issues will be resolved this month :-)

We do have really nice INTERACTIVE font previewing thanks to Ed Trager
though - click the book icons at
http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/files/admin/6 for example - and Ed
is now working on a key feature for community development of fonts -
showing how much language coverage a font has. For the easter (well,
summer? ;-) I hope that we'll have this up and running :-)

Here is an email from Ed today about the new feature that I thought we
should really discuss on list :-)

Happy new year!

Dave

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ed Trager <ed.trager at gmail.com>
Date: 2009/1/1
Subject: Font Analysis Program :: Thoughts on Fonts That Provide Only
Partial Orthographic Coverage

Hi, Dave and Ben,

Happy New Years!

I'm making progress on the font analysis program and it is quite
interesting to see the kinds of coverage that turn up in real-world
fonts.

One interesting (but not unexpected) phenomenon is that fonts often
contain significant but still *incomplete* coverage for certain
orthographies.

For example, here is the current "DEBUG" mode output for Aboriginal
Sans, a font for Latin-based native American language orthographies by
Chris Harvey of LanguageGeek.com:

  Basic Latin is supported!
  Western European is supported!
  Euro is supported!
  Catalan is supported!
  Baltic is supported!
  Turkish is supported!
  Central European is supported!
  Romanian is supported!
  Vietnamese is supported!
  Dutch is supported!
  Afrikaans is supported!
  Pinyin is supported!
  IPA FAILED with 84 hits on 86 tries.   <== NOTICE THIS
  Latin Ligatures is supported!
  Common Name :Aboriginal Sans
  Native Name :
  Sub Family  :Regular
  Has Vertical:0
  Style       :normal
  Weight      :normal
  Fixed Width?:0
  Fixed Sizes?:0
  Num Glyphs  :5084
  Num Chars   :4975

So we see that "Aboriginal Sans" actually does provide almost complete
coverage of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), excepting 2
characters. That hardly represents a "failure" to cover IPA. I have
not yet investigated which two characters are missing -- but we can
infer that they must be rarely-used ones, or at least rarely-used in
Indigenous American language orthographies.

Significant but still incomplete coverage is notable also in CJK
fonts.  Here's an example from an older copy of the Open Source
Firefly Sung Chinese font:

Basic Latin is supported!
Euro is supported!
Pinyin is supported!
Simplified Chinese FAILED with 3499 hits on 3500 tries.
Traditional Chinese is supported!

Again, "failure" due to one missing character out of 3500 does not
really mean lack of coverage -- most likely the missing character
represents one of those "glyph variants" that should never have been
encoded as a separate character in Unicode, but got there anyway.

Properly defining "orthographic coverage" in a Chinese font is in
itself an interesting problem!  The various national and international
standards such as BIG-5 and GB enumerate thousands more Chinese
characters than are actually used by literate educated people on a
daily basis.  Reading a modern Chinese newspaper requires knowledge of
between 3 to 4 thousand characters.  I forget how many BIG-5
enumerates, but I think it is on the order of 20,000 characters -- in
other words, a lot more than most people would need.  Unicode
enumerates even more, especially when the (plane 1) HKSCS is included.

So what I decided to do for Chinese was use a list of the most
frequent top 3500 simplified and top 3500 traditional (there is much
overlap between these sets).  I think this is a reasonable approach.
For example, Chinese and Japanese "art" fonts used for advertising and
graphic design are known to only contain the more common characters
and the abstruse, archaic, and rarely-used technical characters are
left out.  We can anticipate similar phenomena during the development
process of future Open Source CJK fonts.

On the web site, we would like to be able to display summary
orthographic coverage results compactly and succinctly.  The idea of
using a set of little graphical icons has been discussed, and I
created demonstration artwork for 15 Latin orthographic categories.

However, currently those icons are only useful in representing boolean
states: "covered" or "not covered".

Perhaps we can consider adding color to the icons.  I would propose
having not more than 3 states:

  1. Full Coverage
  2. Partial Coverage -- more than 50%
  3. Partial Coverage -- less than 50%

(There is actually a 4th state, "No icon displayed at all" meaning "no
coverage at all" for a given orthography).

In terms of colors, we might initially think "Green--Yellow--Red" as
used in traffic lights.  But as I am often reminded at the Kellogg Eye
Center where I work, a significant percentage of the population,
especially men, are red-green color blind. The rate is something like
8% of the male population.

So green and red are poor choices.  Blues, yellows, and yellow-oranges
are much better choices -- and this is undoubtedly one reason why we
see the predominance of blue in web site color schemes.

So what if we used the following:

  1. Icon with BLUE                       background  -- FULL Coverage
  2. Icon with YELLOW-ORANGE background  -- > 50% Coverage
  3. Icon with GRAY                      background  -- < 50% Coverage
  4. NO ICON                                                     --
NO coverage for this orthography

We could even have tooltips so if you hover over the icon with the
mouse, it could indicate the actual % coverage.

I've attached a quickly-done mockup of some icons.

Let me know what you guys think about this kind of issue.

Best Wishes - Ed
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