[OpenFontLibrary] versioning

[Dave Crossland]

2009/5/11 Emma Jane Hogbin <emma at hicktech.com>:
>
> Do you need an entire alphabet, or can an apprentice create a font from
> a sketch of the letters, a, q, g t and e?

At the Reading school we work on the lowercase word "adhesion" for
months until expanding it out to a full lowercase, then add caps, then
add diacritics, then do a bold set, then draw the italic - more or
less.

As you can see in my LGM2009 OFLB presentation, the "Fontaine"
features we have in the pipeline will make it easy for people to say
"Ah, this font supports my language 88%, and just needs 5 glyphs to be
100%, I can add them this weekend."

I firmly believe this can be extrapolated to taking a bunch of
donations and hired a professional to work for 1 month as far as they
could (say, a 26 letter lowercase and uppercase) then the community
could fill out the rest.

> If we think back to traditional craft and guilds, the master craftsman would
> not necessarily do the work themselves, rather they would have the vision
> implemented by the apprentice. And the apprentice, through practicing their
> craft under supervision, would learn to develop their own vision.

This is how type design foundries work today; when they say a font is
produced by a lone designer working wholly alone, that may sometimes
be true, but this is usually accompanied by the assertion that
collaboration cannot possibly work for type design - which I think is
them trying to convince themselves that free fonts are not going to
disrupt their business.