Please answer to Reply-To... ----- Forwarded message from Eben Sorkin <eben@gci.net> ----- Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2007 03:11:25 -0900 From: Eben Sorkin <eben@gci.net> Subject: Re: Who would be the right person or committe to talk to at Debian about To: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> Cc: Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3) X-CRM114-Status: Good ( pR: 19.6232 ) Thank you for your replies. Because I am a Linux Newbie at best much of this thinking may be naive. Feel free to point out errors of mistaken assumptions! What I am interested in is an active & healthy relationship between independent font foundries & the Linux world. The crux of my idea is that I think maybe some independent font foundries would be interested in supporting Linux distros with fonts if there was a clear path to doing that. It could be a great thing for everybody. From what I have been able to determine so far; and I admit I have been looking into this for just 2 weeks or so; there seem to be relatively few links between the communities. And it isn't clear who to talk to about this when you visit the web site associated with the major distros. Having asked font-people about Linux, the sense I got was that in general they thought there was not much interest in fonts in the Linux world except for maybe 'free fonts'. They attributed this to the relative lack of 'pro' tools for doing graphic design work in Linux and the rendering issues that can exist. For this reason these folks rarely if ever try to test their fonts for Linux. But I have been noticing that graphic design tools are getting stronger in the Linux space and there are stronger & stronger GUIs arriving as well which made me think maybe it was time to start to look for a 'bridge'. It does seem to me that having a greater variety & higher quality core fonts would enhance the competitive stance of Linux. What do you think? On the Linux side so far I have understood that whatever fonts might be proposed as 'core' would need to be become Open source/DFSG and so on like DejaVu and so on. This make complete sense. I think font makers can be flexible about this kind of thing. I have also understood that a wide glyph range would be important to the Linux community. A few years ago this would have been an issue I think. But there is substantial interest in and an increasing numbers of high quality fonts are arriving with full support for CE and other latin glyphs. Often Greek and others kinds of glyphs as well. So in that area I think that the gap may be narrowing. I also have a reason for wondering about Linux which is specific to myself. I have a monospace which I am designing and so I would be interested in the typographic preferences and habits of Linux programmers. But the missing piece is still compensation. I have read that sometimes a distro will create a bounty to accelerate the pace at which a specific bit of code is being made. Perhaps specifications and a bounty can be made for fonts as well. It could be done by a single distro or more properly it might be done by a group of them so the the costs are shared. The only detailed conversations I have with anyone in the Linux community so far have been with Stepan Roh @ the DejaVu project. The last idea I wanted to float comes from David Berlow one of the preeminent makers of Fonts today. Here are some links: http://www.rogerblack.com/blog/screen_fonts_history http://www.rogerblack.com/blog/second_font_war http://typophile.com/node/31124 The thrust of the idea is that rather than design a font assuming that tt hints will be used to make the screen fonts look good at the various sizes why not design the outlines directly for the ppi or pixels per inch? Then you have direct access to your intended outcome on screen (as the bezier wrangler) which is much less frustrating than hinting is; and from my point of view you also have a chance to make the outlines look better in print too because they can be designed with optical principles in mind. For instance fonts for small sizes have to be a bit sturdier to look right and the opening in the o & b & so on must be proportionally larger. The core benefit from a Linux point of view would be ( i think...) that the TT license and the rendering problems associated with not using that code become irrelevant. There are some real issues having to do with font handling that would be associated with this approach. Like making the font outline switch transparent to the user. But I doubt they are insurmountable. I look forward to hearing from you! -e. On Feb 10, 2007, at 6:47 PM, Manoj Srivastava wrote: >Hi, >On Sat, 10 Feb 2007 10:57:36 -0900, Eben Sorkin <eben@gci.net> said: > >>Who would be the right person or committe to talk to at Debian about >>making fonts for Debian and or other Linux distros? > > Well, I am not sure what information exactly you are looking > for. I would think any fonts distributed under a DFSG free license > would be all that is needed to get a set of fonts into Debian > > However, I am copying this reply to the debian-devel mailing > lists, where other developers, better versed than I on font issues, > can chime in. I am also copying this to the font development team, > who are probably the best fit. > > manoj >-- >"In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats." --English proverb >Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/ >~srivasta/> >1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 >424C
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