On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 02:44:49PM -0400, Jim Gettys wrote: > The issue with fonts is lots of people like to *design* fonts, and few > want to do the very laborious job of hinting the glyphs. Acknowledged. > FWIW, I'm told that the manual labor involved in doing the hinting of > a glyph is approximately $10 US; there are people willing to be paid > to do this task. I'm told it is mind-numbingly boring by those who do > it for a living. I'm not yet convinced on this score. There's plenty of tedious, mind-numbingly boring work that gets done in the FLOSS community. Our best and brightest (and, occasionally, those who have simply managed to pass themselves off as such) make the headlines, but in my experience there's a fair amount of tedium in FLOSS development taken as a whole. Where is my intellectual edification in fixing spelling errors in my packages, or retitling dozens of bug reports from the tiresome and useless "teh X server don't work"[sic] subjects that they are so frequently saddled with? I do a lot of scut work as a service to my fellow developers, with a mixture of experience and faith telling me that my labors pay off for the Debian community as a whole -- and sometimes for the larger community as well. I also do scut work to help create the perception that Debian is a tightly-crafted, high-polished work. Suits with ulterior motives to serve will often seize upon the silliest of cosmetic defects to reject a FLOSS alternative to the proprietary works peddled by their golf buddies, and it pleases me a little to make them work harder to find fig leaves. That you spend your time, for example, on work you don't find mind-numbing and soul-destroying is a definite plus. I don't insist that *you* roll up your sleeves and start hinting fonts. We each scratch the itches we've got. All that said, I do not rule out that you may be right. The work of hinting fonts may be so horrendous that we simply will never be able to find enough FLOSS developers to do it. But I think to promote that possibility to a conclusion is dreadfully hasty. I'd like to see the community take a crack at it first. > And while there are some open source tools for editing fonts, none of > them have addressed the hinting problem, where we have no tools > whatsoever (some commercial tools exist, none are on Linux, and many of > the font foundries use their own proprietary tools). That's a definite prerequisite to the community getting involved. If you know of a good forum or audience (frustrated and embittered ex-employees of a business destroyed by Adobe, perhaps) for evangelizing the need for development of a good freely-license font hinting tool, please let me know. My name doesn't carry a lot of weight, but this is a cause for which I'm to stump. > The issue then is the multiplication of $10 US * # glyphs in a font > face, * # faces in the font family. That turns out to be a lot of > non-fun work and/or very expensive. Even a WGL4 font has 640 glyphs or > so in a single face; a Unicode font face with coverage for many > languages gets much larger than that. As a monolingual developer, I can't be sure, but I don't imagine that the great deal of translation and localization work that goes into many Free Software projects (including the debconf templates of the Debian XFree86 packages), is regarded as an ecstatically creative process by those who do it. I don't see why font hinting should be so different, though since I am analogizing to a field in which I admit my ignorance, I could be persuaded that it is. :) > Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic about getting people to do the hinting > part of the job... Maybe I'm wrong, and the first step would be for > someone to write a tool to help help with the hinting (or it will be > a lot more than $10 US of someone's time). I fear that the advent of the Bitstream Vera fonts with their IMO broken license[1] may exemplify an inversion of the old adage "the perfect is the enemy of the good". With those fonts around, the motivation of some people to help build a sanely-licensed font pool may have been diminished. ...in which case I guess my mission is to keep explaining why the Bitstream Vera font license is broken. :) > P.S. If you do try to write a font license, please give me a call and > I'll give a brain dump on the concerns that community will raise. I wouldn't dream of trying to wade into these particular waters without consulting more knowledge people, and you of course come immediately to mind given our past discussions around the same subject. In short, "will do." :) As the briefest of asides on this subject, given the way fonts are typically used, I think they're ideal for an application of a "soft" copyleft a la the LGPL (not that license precisely, but something like it). I'm pretty sure a "hard" copyleft like the GNU GPL, whereby one could be required to adapt the license on one's document simply due to the font used to print it, is not a good idea. [1] I don't want to start a big digression here, but I should point out that this statement should not be interpreted as a slam on your efforts to obtain some high-quality, freely-redistributable fonts for FLOSS desktop environments. Responsibility for bad licensing decisions ultimately lies with those who make them, not those who offer counsel. I strive to speak my honest concience about the Bitstream Vera license[2] without diminishing your highly laudable work in improving the user experience for all GNU/Linux distributions. It is challenging to advocate the process of improvement without pointing out how the status quo is deficient. I sometimes feel that I have to thread a fairly narrow path, so if something I say ever alienates you, please don't hesitate to contact me privately. [2] ...a matter of which many people claim I'm making a tempest in a teapot. That's okay. It's far from the first time I've been thus accused. :) -- G. Branden Robinson | If you wish to strive for peace of Debian GNU/Linux | soul, then believe; if you wish to branden@debian.org | be a devotee of truth, then http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | inquire. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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