24 Jul 2000 freetype   » (Master)

The first "FreeType meeting" was organized this week-end in Aachen (Germany), and it has been really fun & interesting. One of my greatest pleasures was to finally meet Werner Lemberg (whom I've been working with for nearly 4 years now) and Just Van Rossum (though I only realized one hour before he left who he and his friend Eric really were). There was also Robert and Thorsten.

We discussed lots of topics: font formats, font editors, OpenType/GX, advanced typography, etc..

Thorsten made an impressive demo of some new font technology/format that his company developped, and is unable to really sell given the lack of adequate support in current systems (Windows/Mac/Unix/etc..).

We claimed that by developing a FT2 module, they could be able to target embedded system integrators, who would more than likely welcome such technology. After all, the system has been designed to allow the inclusion of proprietary font drivers as well.

We also talked a lot about the future of FreeType, and more specifically an upcoming engine that will be used to layout international text and perform advanced typographic effects. I think we have found some pretty ideas to really separate the "C coding work" from the really "typographic/language work". If succesful, this should allow the work to be distributed among a lot more people and to use Python instead of C whenever possible..

And also some talks regarding a few of my own top-secret projects :-)

I missed my train back to Paris (I hadn't run so fast for a long time, that really aches :-), had to find an hotel room (it was noisy as hell) before returning on Sunday.. Spend some time with my family then..

All in all, it has been fun, and turned to be a _lot_ more intersting than I initially expected. We should definitively invite more people the next time (i.e. Antoine, Peak, and other important contributors that are in Europe too)

For now, I'm packing up the last bits of the last FreeType 2 beta release (you know, the one that was promised "real soon now" in my last diary entry. Actually, the auto-hinting module has been available for more than a week now, but we're still updating some docs and the build system which now runs as intended on Unix)

If I'm lucky, the tarballs will be announced tonight.. I'm crossing my fingers..

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