[OpenFontLibrary] versioning

[Dave Crossland]

2009/5/11 Schrijver <eric at authoritism.net>:
>>>
>>> I had thought of scripting Fontforge but it seemed a bit heavyweight for
>>> hosted solutions,
>>
>> Um, really? Where is the weight?
>
> It is a compiled C binary, no, with dependencies and everything?

FontForge is famous for having optional, and even at that, very few,
dependencies.

> So maybe not necessarily heavyweight, but just not as portable as, say, a
> python script by itself?

Standard C is just as portable than Python, if not more so. You need
to recompile C, but then you need to install Python too.

> I could imagine writing something like a plugin for something like Launchpad
> would be hindered by that.

That's Canonical's problem. When you can `aptitude install launchpad`
then you can `aptitude install fontforge` just as easily, but when
Canonical hosts a launchpad instance at large scale, they will have
all kinds of problems small installations don't have to worry about.

> Technical question:
>
> Fontforge can also generate OTF’s, no? Because you give an example with a
> TTF, but than you can’t get the contextual alternates etc IIRC

Yes, it can, I just use TTF as an example. (And I use TTF at the
moment in my work because I'm not doing any OT features and TTFs work
more widely as web fonts.)