[OpenFontLibrary] versioning

[Aaron Spaulding]

Schrijver wrote:
> 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

I pretty much just had the same idea.  If we could create the font on 
the fly a user could mix, match, subset, or apply effects to the font 
from a web interface.  Then the user could save the derived version to 
their account.  If the original version is updated the derivatives could 
be regenerated automatically.

-- 
Aaron
sachimp.com
getCorkd.com