[OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 12:51:51PM -0600, Barry Schwartz wrote:
> Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> skribis:
> > But how OFLB is going to fix this, I don't think you are suggesting that
> > we (OFLB community, whatever it means) rewrite most of free software
> > text layout stack (and funny "DTP" applications) to support advanced
> > typography. So, I think you mean writing smaller applications that are
> > are able to really utilize our free fonts, but I then fail to see what
> > is the use of such applications if can fit in a larger ecosystem and
> > work flow?
> 
> That would not be the way to go. If it is going to be done at all it
> has to be by getting other projects to fix their stuff in exchange for
> synergistic bundling. Right now it is as if we had a Firefox with
> mostly non-functional add-on support, along with a handful of sites to
> which Firefox didn't link that offered add-ons that depended on
> Firefox features that always crashed.

I do understand this. But upstream developers are just not interested (a
patch to implement proper, TeX-like, H&J for Pango have been ignored for
years, all requests and offers to help implementing OpenType support for
Scribus have been ignored, etc.) and I don't see this changing.

> > I, myself, gave up and switched to TeX world, though weired and archaic
> > it seems, they at least have some clue on what good typography is.
> 
> TeX has wasted more person-years than I can imagine. Making it
> possible to write actual programs in TeX was an astounding mistake,
> which is responsible for LaTeX3 and for an almost total lack of
> advancement for decades. All the time that has gone into LaTeX3 (if
> not LaTeX itself) should have been spent on writing new stuff in real
> programming languages, the way ANT came about. Imagine where we could
> have been by now.

Well, things are changing now with the advent of LuaTeX, thanks to its
backward compatibility, it is taking slowly over TeX world (see ConTeXt
for example, which is being rewritten in Lua), unlike ANT which never
gained momentum.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer