15 Oct 2008 (updated 15 Oct 2008 at 21:47 UTC)
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Open fonts on the XO (Sugar environment)
Today I flashed my XO
(gotten through the G1G1 program
from OLPC) to release
8.2 and I'm very pleased to see all the progress made
with the whole stack. There are huge improvements to Sugar:
nicer navigability and usability, higher responsiveness, a
wider set of improved activities, tremendously improved
neighbourhood view/network management, and of course the
localizers/translators
have done great work to reduce the
language barriers.
In short there are a lot of very nice touches here and there
to make the whole experience even better for the many
children out there. Big kudos to all involved :-)
Besides Dejavu with its own peculiar license, various
quality open fonts released under OFL are currently
available by default. You can see choose them from the Write
activity (Abiword-based):
And using the Terminal activity you can easily install extra
open fonts packaged by the great Fedora Font
SIG from the repositories via yum:
- Ecolier Court
- Ecolier Lignes Court
- Gentium
- Gentium Basic
- Andika Basic
- Padauk
- Libertine
- Jomolhari
- Inconsolata
- GFS Artemisia
- GFS Baskerville
- GFS Bodoni
- GFS Bodoni Classic
- GFS Complutum
- GFS Didot
- GFS Didot Classic
- GFS Gazis
- GFS Neohellenic
- GFS Olga
- GFS Solomos
- GFS Theokritos
- Edrip
- Doulos SIL
- Charis SIL
- Brett
- Silkscreen
- RoadStencil
We'll see how some of these open fonts can be included by
default in the deployment target where it makes sense.
High-quality redistributable and modifiable fonts certainly
have a key role to play in the
education goals of such a project. This is where a
community-recognized license like the OFL taking care of
issues like embedding, naming collisions and artistic
integrity - allowing them to be used without problems as
well as further maintained by the open font community - is
crucial.
SugarLabs and OLPC have huge challenges to tackle in terms
of i18n, so I'm glad to see the progress made in enabling
wider language support by picking open fonts allowing
designers to extend the fonts to meet local needs.
It's also a joy to see how beautifully the fonts render on
the tiny but high-res XO screen and to imagine the many kids
learning to read and write in this environment. Seeing the
beautiful shapes of your mother-tongue script has to be a
good motivator to learn...