[OpenFontLibrary] The future of OFLB development

[Peter Baker]

I'd like to support the idea of OFL indexing Open Source fonts that
are hosted elsewhere. To speak as a frequent visitor to OFL and an
occasional font maker, it would be great to have a resource that
aggregates Libre fonts (or at least the major ones) and is actually
kept up to date.

Yet I can see major technical problems, especially if you intend to
include descriptions samples and the like. How would you pull fonts
from GitHub, SourceForge and elsewhere (each source presenting its own
set of problems, not to mention all the things released from the
designers' own webpages)? How do you cope with the fact that every
font is differently packaged (for there is no standard for packaging
fonts)? If the answer is to get font designers to cooperate, what are
the incentives? When I release a new version of my biggest font
project, I already have a lengthy checklist to get through: I'm not
eager to add the making and uploading of a new package for OFL, or
samples, or descriptions, to my list of stuff to do--just as I don't,
for example, think it my job to provide Linux packages or update the
Wikipedia page. If the answer is for the website's maintainers to find
and index the fonts, how do you ensure the continuity of the effort?

The idea of serving webfonts is I think a non-starter. The bandwidth
involved would be immense: who would provide the funding? And if
Google is providing the same service, what's the point?

Peter Baker