Older blog entries for yosch (starting at number 105)

The private beta program for the open font commissioned for Ubuntu has now been launched. With a webapp to help gather relevant feedback (submitted LP #602933 for better font detection).

The precise details of the DVCS tree holding the various font source formats and the licensing are still to be decided and revealed. Hopefully Kenneth (along with his design team @ Canonical) is looking into my recommendations from discussions at the last LGM and from follow-up emails on open font release and maintainership best practises.

Still waiting for more detailed feedback from you Kenneth...

Ben, I'm glad you're enjoying the content despite what I feel is - ahem - rather lousy delivery and insufficient preparation... I realise I need to work on my public speaking skills... Thankfully there were quite a few other font-related talks by key members of our growing community :-)

Anyway, hopefully some of the recommendations (and corresponding tools) provide useful food for thought for your various webdesign and open font projects.

Looks like the upstream Droid font repository has recently received new drops of updates from commissioned designers: improved hinting, new smart features, initial support for Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. Thankfully there are no encumbered licensing discrepancies in the metadata. Well-done! Thanks for releasing that work more widely.

Still no FONTLOG.txt included yet though...

Come help tackle fontconfig related bugs in Ubuntu.

Marc-Tobias Kunisch from the team behind the Google fonts directory has recently posted various articles about webfonts and related issues (manchmal auch auf Deutsch). Well-worth reading.

The 5th LGM (Libre Graphics Meeting) which happened in Brussels over the past few days is now over... Huge amounts of awesome all around, thanks so much to everyone who contributed and made it possible: the various teams, the larger community, the organisation team and the sponsors! It was great to see plenty of friends, meet new people, share, learn, experiment and come back with lots of new inspiring and promising ideas for the future of our projects.

Among various other font-related things: STI Pub released the long-awaited Stix Fonts v1.0, lots of extra good work has gone into the Open Font Library both on the hosting and policy aspects to bring it closer than ever to full launch and making it a very valuable community resource. There were various high quality talks and sessions around fonts. Also we had good discussions on best practises around open font design and cross-toolkit approaches which should benefit various projects from OSP's foundry, to the Google Font Directory to the Ubuntu open font family project.

More later from the whirldwind of font-related sessions, discussions and plans as I digest all my notes :-)

I'm about to hop on a train to join all the libre software creative fun at this year's Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels. Plenty of awesomeness ahead: an amazing program with lots of font-related talks and sessions, plenty of participants representing many key libre graphics projects. LGM really is the major libre software conference for graphics and related topics like open fonts. Pretty sure this year's edition will bring many community projects forward.

BTW you can still support the event.

Interesting to see that there is already a Wordpress plugin and a Drupal module to make it even easier to use the open fonts available from the Google Font Directory.

Pretty slick to compare the rendering of fonts directly on the web by adding your own text and tweaking the knobs on dynamic font previewers such as Google Font Directory's preview, Kernest's comparator, Myfontbook or even font dragr. Go check them out.

Our repository of useful open font utilities has been updated: rather small scripts at this stage but still very handy for packagers and designers to quickly parse full font metadata, measure Unicode coverage (even against a text corpus), visually compare font rendering among installed font families. There's also a Nautilus installation script and a template fontforge build script.

The Open Font Library (OFLB) wiki has some more links to useful tools to do open font design.

I've also made a few Open Font Library (OFLB) related items available.

Enjoy.