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[Russell Shaw]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> Le Ven 29 janvier 2010 14:40, Russell Shaw a écrit :
> 
>> The right way is to make each font a smart font that is simply a C library
>> plugin.
> 
> In other words, you can't handle real-world fonts. Since those cost millions
> and can take months or even years to create (see stix), since people like to
> have many of them, and want to interoperate with other people that use fonts
> in existing formats on other systems, I can't see how your advice is anything
> other than utterly wrong and dangerous.
> 
> Unless someone has a few billions to blow to check if your idea is workable.

It's not a good solution for immediate use, but i only design things "the way
they should be".

Many fonts may cost a bit to make, and sold at extortionistic prices over and
over like any other high priced closed source licence software. They also have
eulas saying no reverse engineering and no copying.

I see any use of truetype/postscript fonts of questionable legality when one
has to make a hinting interpreter. Many of these font files are so full of old
cruft making them hard to build, verify, and modify, that i avoid them when
possible for my own applications.

There is no need for font creation to be expensive. It just requires a bit
of artistic styling for the outlines, some simple hinting in the vertical
direction (for horizontal text), and some predefined language/script specific
libraries for contextual analysis. It can all be done as a C plugin making all
the interpreter machinery unneccessary.

There's no shortage of poor arts students that would create font outlines
and have their name on it. With a decent fontforge-like font CAD program
and a well defined procedure for creating a font, things would be a lot easier.
I'm ok at drawing cursive font outlines on paper anyway. I'll make my own
cursive font. Currently i just use font outline data copied from an existing
free font for personal use. If such a new font format were released, permission
from existing font authors could be sought to copy the outline data.

None of this really matters because i don't care if i'm the only one that
uses this stuff. I'd prefer to be ignored as a troll because I have a better
job than programming all day and just hack on it as a hobby for my own use.
Would have been good to see existing software a bit better though.
I'm now productive so i'm happy.