[Clipart] SVG font

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Jon Phillips <jon at rejon.org> writes:

> On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 13:21 -0400, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
>> Jon Phillips <jon at rejon.org> writes:
>> 
>> > I think it suits our project best to release fonts in an open
>> > standard.  Are OpenType or TrueType open standards?
>> 
>> Define "open standard".  TrueType and OpenType were not designed by a
>> working group for a standards body in view of the public, but they do
>> have published and available format specifications.
>
> I wonder what the pros and cons of supporting True Type or Open Type
> would be. 

The obvious pro would be ubiquity.  Just about every graphical
operating environment in the known universe (Windows 3.x, Windows 9x,
NT, Mac Classic, OS X, XFree (via FreeType or Xft), BeOS, ...)
supports these fonts, both for on-screen use and for print use.  For
anything WYSIWYG, it is essential that whatever font format you
choose, it work both on screen and in print, which implies it must be
scalable, i.e., no bitmap fonts.  Text editors and mailreaders and the
like can get away with bitmapped fonts on screen and printer fonts for
printing, but word processors and whatnot cannot, this century.  Of
course, there are other scalable font formats that can be used both on
screen and in print (and SVG surely qualifies here), but
TrueType/OpenType is substantially the most common.  The only other
scalable font format that's even remotely common is PostScript fonts.

The obvious con, for OCAL, is that it would complicate our toolchain
and our process and take time away from our main focus on clipart.

There are other factors, but those seem to me like the most relevant
ones.

> I started looking at the specs a bit:
>
> http://www.adobe.co.uk/type/opentype/main.html
> http://www.microsoft.com/OpenType/OTSpec/
> http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/opentype.htm
>
> Mainly, what is the deal with licensing?

You mean the copyright statement and "terms of use" on the web page?
I think that's a standard footer for that site.  You can see for
instance the same copyright statement and link (albeit formatted a
little differently) on the MS Typography front page
(microsoft.com/typography).  My understanding would be that this
refers to the web page itself.  The Terms of Use certainly seem to
read that way, e.g., there are clauses about links to third-party
sites; the "Description of Services" clause sounds particularly like
it is describing your use of the Microsoft website.

So I don't think that has any impact for fonts that are created in
TrueType or OpenType format.  Their website is just the place
(possibly not the only place; I don't know) where they chose to
publish the format spec.

> I'm not sure about this at present. The Open Clip Art Library is to
> collect clip art and not just SVG, right? So, my initial thought is
> more in-line with how Inkscape is trying to be a compliant SVG
> editor. Thus, OCAL is not trying to be compliant with SVG, but it is
> the default format for clip art, which are static graphical bits by
> definition.
>
> Hmmm...I guess we could register Open Font Library
> (www.openfontlibrary.org) and then just start shuffling fonts that
> direction. I've thought the same about getting the domain name
> www.openmedialibrary.org.
>
> In terms of time output, I don't think we have time to maintain these
> but maybe it would be a good idea to get the names. Thoughts?

I think I agree that we probably don't have the time to maintain a
font collection at the moment, in addition to the clipart collection.
If it were left up to me, I'd probably leave it to somebody else.

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