[OpenFontLibrary] Status report about the new OFLB

[James Weiner]

Looks good to me! I would be happy with the mixed contrast set too I  
think

James

On 1 Jan 2009, at 21:04, Dave Crossland wrote:

> 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
> <coloredIcons.png>