Older blog entries for yosch (starting at number 2)

A few sessions I think are really worth attending and contributing to if you happen to be in St-Petersburg for the AtypI conference this week:

• Open fonts and African needs by Denis "moyogo" Jacquerye, Dejavu's co-lead about the special needs of African languages and the various ways in which a FLOSS approach is useful.

• Fonts for every language: New types for cultural treasures by Victor Gaultney of SIL about advocacy and awareness-raising for the many writing systems still in need of proper fonts and ways in which initiatives in the wider open font community are helping tackling these challenges and how you can participate.

• Crossing borders: The best of different worlds by Frank E. Blokland about integrating various tools and platform in a font design workflow. Hopefully raising awareness about the maturing open font design toolkit: inkscape, fontforge (with spiro goodness) and various helper scripts...

• Also there will be some talks and debates on the future of fonts on the web. I hope these discussions about web fonts will take into account the needs/goals of all the stakeholders.

Hopefully some slides and recordings will be made available...

Seems like the whole web fonts issue is making good progress these days.

Mozilla (thanks to the amazing Robert O'Callahan and John Dagget) has just recently joined the other User Agents implementing @font-face from CSS3 (not yet cross-platform but well on its way).

Open fonts - as in fonts released under the Open Font License - certainly have a key role to play as the W3C recognizes. And for this IMHO the next step is parsing the font metadata and showing it to the user so they can know more about the fonts used in each page: for example which designer, supporting organisation/foundry is involved (there are links for that too), some description and among other useful things if it's an open font or not via the License and License URL fields. The Opentype spec has provision for enough metadata placeholders.

The idea of expressing the OFL in Creative-Commons-like human-readable icons may well be the model to follow...

Well I guess I should start blogging and join the web-based pow-wow since Planet Open Fonts is now up and has already gathered a number of very interesting posts. (There's also a Satellite open fonts vcs tracking VCS commits for various font-related community repos).

So what's been happening in font land these days? We are we in term of the open font community now? Glad you asked because actually things have pretty much exceeded our initial expectations! Despite the many challenges to tackle - especially with the more complex writing systems - we're well on our way I think! Looking back at the beginning of our research around the ideal community model for fonts back in 2001 with Victor's Gentium project and the Writing Systems Implementation work with UNESCO it's tremendous to see the concerted efforts from many amazing people out there to establish what is needed for a collaborative typographic community over the past few years...

But first of all, why do we actually need open fonts at all? What's the purpose of all this?

Let's put it this way: if Gutenberg's genius and consecutive transformative reforms are attributed to "movable type" designed to accelerate and make the creation of books easier and cheaper, then the open font movement with its Open Font License is designed to go even further and do this at the Free Software level: allowing and encouraging the moving of glyphs and the smart code (modern information age type if you will) around more easily, extending and fixing fonts to make it easier to publish content in as many languages as possible...

The consultation for an ideal collaborative type design and distribution model has been done with much input and refinement from various communities: many different conferences have seen discussions with key community figures, lightning talks, BoFs, talks, demos and workshops covering aspects of the open font community's projects and challenges... Events like Solutions Linux in Paris, RMLL in Dijon, WSIS in Geneva and Tunis, GUADEC in Vilanova, Akademy in Glasgow, UDS in Paris and Prague, Debconf in Edinburgh, LGM in Lyon Montréal and Wroclaw OOoconf in Lyon, TLM in Boston Glasgow and Wroclaw, AtypIconf in Lisbon, TUG in San Diego, BachoTeX in well Bachotex, GNU Hackers meeting 2008 in Bristol. There were also a bunch of IRC meetings, confcalls and mailing-list discussions.

The result is that we now have a good and community recommended licensing framework, a pretty advanced toolkit (fontforge and friends) and an increasing number of community members (upstream projects and distros as linked from the planet ) benefiting from and contributing to the improvement of an open font landscape.

I'll go over some figures and give a more precise overview of who's been involved, the significant milestones and the next challenges we have in the next posts. Stay tuned.

Free the glyphs !