Font Service Proposal

[Liam R. E. Quin]

Hello!

I filled in the form about a month ago for a new project, a font
service.

Wot dat?

The problem being addressed is that fonts are too hard, especially in
the graphic design & typography arenas.

Libre graphics software today is behind a lot of proprietary software
in ability to use opentype fonts, to access font features, to select
variable font instances, to change colours in colour fonts, to apply
variation selectors automatically, let alone to use some of the newer
OpenType features such as AVAR 2 or HOI, but, there are fonts out there
that use these features (OK, not so much AVAR 2 yet but all the
others).

In addition, installing and using a font can be confusing in the
presence of containerized apps (FlatPak, Docker, etc), as to whether
the program can access system or user fonts.

The proposal:

A dbus service.

An application user opens a text tool.

The application sends a "list of fonts" message to the dbus service,
which is started if needed.

A UI appears, and the user can choose one or more fonts, can choose a
font from a list, can add/remove folders to find fonts, can configure a
font (opentype features, variant characters, variation selectors, axes,
colours...), can make lists of fonts e.g. for specific projects, can
find fonts by tag as well as by name or folder or feature.

The result is sent back to the application.

The service would also be able to send the font file to the
application, so that containered applications could access fonts
installed outside the desktop.


This originally came up in the context of improving OpenType support in
GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Better to improve OpenType
support across the desktop (any desktop, not only GNOME or KDE), and
also to be cross-platform.

Hence, the UI could be provided by GIMP, but also by the desktop, so
KDE users would get a Qt-bnased one, GNOME users a Gtk-based one, and
Enlightenment users would... er... could use the GIMP one or have an
eFont program.

Discussion at the libregaphicsmeeting.org conference in Rennes this
past May suggested cross-application support, with interest from GIMP,
Inkscape, Krita and others.

The work is difficult, requires very specialist knowledge, so that
individual programs haven't taken it on, or have done a partial job (i
just went to enable Historical Ligatures for a project using
LibreOffice and it wasn't offered as a choice...; others support
variable font axes but without preview... etc etc)

I’d like, we [GIMP] would like, to host something somewhere application
and platform neutral, hence approaching xdg.

If we work together we can make all the things better.

What do you think?

liam



-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org