[OpenFontLibrary] versioning

[Schrijver]

Hello,

&props to anyone at the Libre Graphics Meeting!

I am not in Montréal, wish you all a lot of fun there, but thought I  
could join in the spirit of collaboration :-)
So I put together a page on possible workflows for collaborative  
development of typefaces!

at the wiki: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Collaborative_Design_Workflows

I am really interested in mapping the mechanisms of Open Source  
software development to the production of cultural artefacts;  There  
was a discussion on Typophile before on this, in March,
And I conversed with Nicolas and Liam about this on ##fonts (most of  
the links on this page come from Nicolas).

Unfortunately some things came in my way to pursue this further
But better late than never, no?

The wiki-page talks about versioning in general, But with regards to  
fonts I have only one particular experience, being with the  
OpenBaskerville project, which uses the UFO format and is hosted on  
GitHub.
I thought I’d share some of the developments and open questions here.


One exciting development I didn’t mention yet on the list, is that  
GitHub now supports visualising UFO’s:
http://github.com/rbmntjs/open-baskerville/tree/bc03fca9968df8683b3df2ae9afb0185c4acf433/OpenBaskerville.ufo

And even, this I think is super funky, visual diffs!
http://github.com/rbmntjs/open-baskerville/commit/c5b3322fb49baa3104363ca98546c684d940c0ef

I had sent them a mail asking if they could help me create something  
similar using their API, and they responded within a day. saying that  
they thought it was so cool that we were pushing for collaborative  
development of open source typefaces, that they had hacked together  
basic UFO support on GitHub!

And within another two days, it was a live feature of the site

However there still is a gap within this workflow—how do you generate  
distributable font files from the UFO?
It would be great if you could do that programmaticaly, so you could  
have a completely hosted solution, where you can download snapshot- 
fonts of the development process…

Completely 21st century agile!

Tal Lemings UFO2FDK is meant to aid in the process of generating  
OTF’s, but interfaces with the proprietary and platform-specific AFDKO http://code.typesupply.com/wiki/ufo2fdk 
  .

Anyone smart ideas?

Take care,

Eric