[OpenFontLibrary] Phone conversation with Ed Trager

[Schrijver]

thanks,

my thoughts:

1.

new architecture is not #1 priority right now—
lets get this one up!
the demo site has been looking so great. i love the design, I love the features, the work all of you have put into it! and it seemed perfectly usable for day to day use.
users don’t really care what it is hosted on…

2.

when it’s up, can we asap host the code on git or mercurial so anyone can fork and submit patches?
the development proces is closed now
which is a shame for an open project—
with the source available bugs can be filed and patches submitted!

3.

after which, the backend…
I agree the fonts should be in dvcs. Dvcs is great! I use git but apparently mercurial is awesome as well.
The merging/branching thing is what dvcs is all about,
it would be a shame to reinvent the weel with something homegrown.

these systems are by default not very friendly to novice users since they use the command line (though they are not that difficult—i got taught the basics of git in half an hour).
But the web app could provide a nice graphical interface to them! I am sure there is work being done in this area, and if not, well it would be all the more useful to work on it :)

I imagine more tech-savvy users could still use the clone url’s to access the repositories directly.
Then you would really have a rock-solid collaboration platform.

For the app, django or web.py seem like a good idea.
I do not know the aiki framework, so i am not sure if it would be suited to integration with the dvcses?

An online font editor is a lofty but lovely goal.
I imagine it could plug in to the same architecture of dvc.

Maybe the repositories need abstraction layer then, so they can easily be acccessed through a restful api (though that would be hard to code i imagine).

4.

As a sidenote, i remember dave we wrote about generating otf from ufo’s. i could not get fontforge installed at the time, because my shared hosting did not allow it. but i will be getting a linux vps shortly, so i can try it out. And it is funny that you mention web.py, because I was planning on trying to use that to make a little web service that generated the font files. The idea:
-users commits updated ufo to dvcs
-post commit hook sends ufo to service
-service generates otf, which gets send, to, eeuhm, well some specified location, so that there always is a font file to use for the most recent changes
Hey wait that is like a compiler
Maybe something nice to tinker at for LGM

Best
Eric


Op 7 mrt 2010, om 21:02 heeft Dave Crossland het volgende geschreven:

> Hi!
> 
> Today I made a phonecall to Ed Trager to catch up and discuss the
> project. Here are my notes from the talk:
> 
> Dave explained why the site is being held up - that there are 4 people
> with SSH access to the new server (me, Ben Weiner, Jon Philips, and Ed
> Trager) and of them, I am the most free, and I haven't done the work
> of getting ccHost 5 running with the theme Ben and Aaron made and the
> font preview program Ed made. Once this is done, the next step will be
> to consider what to replace ccHost with. Jon has been involved with
> the creation of aikiframework.org (NOT a wiki framework!) that has
> just gone live for openclipart.org and this could well be a contender.
> 
> Ed thinks about replacing ccHost with a custom webapp. The most needed
> feature is managing the fonts; thats 1 sql table for where the fonts
> are on disk, and their metadata. Then another feature for font
> authors/editors, with an OpenID backend so its just tracking who is an
> editor for what files. The web design and the important system
> architecture can be reused from Ben Weiner's work on ccHost. Ed is
> using Drupal for other projects.
> 
> Dave thought that whatever it is, it must be RESTful for integration
> with FF and so on. The feature he would think of when looking at
> suitability is, how easy it will be to implement a user viewing a
> font, downloading it, modifying on their computer, and then uploading
> v1.1 with some glyphs changed and some new ones added, as a fork of
> the original. ccHost supports this, albeit not very well. And then,
> crucially, the feature would be extended to support the original's
> author to merge these patches into their trunk. This could be with
> Aiki or anything custom with a DVCS file store - web.py and django
> were my immediate thoughts.
> 
> Ed is very happy with his latest "Font Playground" program, which is a
> jQuery plugin. He recently met a Nigerian guy in Michigan who has
> difficulty with the keyboard input for the Nigerian language (a latin
> variant). With the jQuery framework it is easy for Ed to implement
> this layout.
> 
> The next feature Ed plans to add to the playground is using browser
> feature detection to transparently switch from PNG font rendering to
> @font-face rendering as used in http://www.oep-h.com/LOF/ (also qith
> jQuery!). I am happy to support this.
> 
> Dave suggested the end result of Open Font Library ought to be an
> online collaborative font editor. http://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/
> shows great promise in that direction, if we can do the system
> architecture for the collaborative and font specific aspects - Ed
> mentioned that the http://wenq.org/ font project already has such an
> online font editor, eg http://wenq.org/index.cgi?Canvas#U251F8
> 
> Cheers
> Dave