[OpenFontLibrary] FontConf - the unconference on @font-face and web fonts.

Garrick Van Buren garrick at kernest.com
Wed Mar 10 21:02:28 PST 2010


I'm organizing an unconference on web fonts & @font-face use - http://fontconf.com

If you're passing through St. Paul, MN this summer - I'd love to have someone lead a session on the OFLB and the OFL (and related licenses).

Details @ http://fontconf.com 

Thanks.

-----------------------
Garrick Van Buren
612 325 9110
garrick at kernest.com
-----------------------
Kernest.com
Free and Commercial Web Fonts
-----------------------

On Mar 10, 2010, at 10:56 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:

> 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



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