[OpenFontLibrary] Recent non-font content on OFLB

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 05:00:57PM -0600, Barry Schwartz wrote:
> Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> skribis:
> > 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.
> 
> ANT, written almost entirely by one guy in an actual programming
> language, never gained momentum because people have had their minds
> numbed by TeX and glorified assembly languages. We have had issue
> after issue after issue of TUGboat, year after year, devoted to newer
> and more intricate ways to drive a nail with a sponge. The appeal is
> understandable; give me a chance to write in an assembly language,
> when I was still capable of such things, and I could get lost in
> it. Even fontforge is written in a mere glorified assembly language
> that is the main reason the program crashes, crashes, crashes, because
> the compiler is happy to compile stupid things that an OCaml compiler
> would never come close to accepting and which no one should have to
> worry about in 2010 in an application.

I was not saying ANT is not good (well, I know no OCmal anyway), I'm
just saying that in a very conservative world like TeX, if you don't
maintain some level of backward compatibility (LuaTeX isn't fully
backward compatible), people will not adopt your engine.

BTW, AFAIU, Knuth didn't want to have a programing language in TeX; the
macros was intended for users designing the layout of their books, every
one was expected to write their own extended TeX engine in pascal, but
nobody did :)

> This is all kind of off-topic, but it is too easy to get sucked into
> bit twiddling. Bit twiddling is a curse on mankind. OFLB can have all
> kinds of bells and whistles, but some graphic design and an effort to
> appeal to actual, non-TeXie font-users have made League of Moveable
> Type a more productive place to post fonts, from my point of view
> wherein, frankly, TeXies can be taken for granted. They'll use
> anything capable of doing text, even if it is buried under three
> layers of tarballing in an ftp directory on an obscure host.
> 
> :)

Back to the main point, lets just hope OFLB v2 will ever be online, then
we can discuss all sorts of improving it, but I don't think it makes any
sense right now.

Regards,
 Khaled

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