Re: Please -- more DFSG-free font packages, if you can maintain them well

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>]

Branden Robinson wrote:

> 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?

Just to chime in, I have spent a fair amount of time cleaning up Makefiles
and autoconf scripts.  Most of this consists of removing dead and obsolete
code, simplifying logic, and adding comments.  Most people consider this
tedious and mind-numbingly boring; nevertheless it's quite popular and
everyone is very appreciative.  And I rather like doing it, personally.

If there were a font-hinting tool, I'd probably do occasional hinting. 
Sometimes it's actually rather fun to do "tedious" tweaking work.

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