Advogato blog for yosch

5 Mar 2010

Fri, 5 Mar 2010 13:48:14 GMT

Very promising plans underway for a new Ubuntu open font

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, recently announced the commission of a new open font for Ubuntu and Canonical:

"We have commissioned a new font to be developed both for the logo’s of Ubuntu and Canonical, and for use in the interface. The font will be called Ubuntu, and will be a modern humanist font that is optimised for screen legibility. It will be published under an open font license, and considered part of the trade dress of Ubuntu, which will limit its relevance for software interfaces outside of Ubuntu but leave it free for use across the web and in printed documents.
It will take a few months for the font to be finalised, initial elements will be final in the next week which will be sufficient for the logo and other bits and pieces, but I expect to see that font widely used in 10.10. The work has been commissioned from world-renowned fontographers Dalton Maag, who have expressed excitement at the opportunity to publish an open font and also a font that they know will be used daily by millions of people.
Initial coverage will be Western, Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic character sets, but over time we may be able to extend that to being a full Unicode font, with great kerning and hinting for print and screen usage globally. We are considering an internship program, to support aspiring fontographers from all corners of the world to visit London and work with Dalton Maag to extend the font to their own regional glyph set.
The critical test of the font is screen efficiency and legibility, and its character and personality are secondary to its fitness for that purpose. Nevertheless, our hope is that the font has a look that is elegant and expresses the full set of values for both Canonical and Ubuntu: adroitness, accountability, precision, reliability, freedom and collaboration. We’ll publish more as soon as we have it."

What's not to love about this announcement? Seriously, this is very promising... Talk about best practises for setting up an open font project and setting the pace for global derivative branding of a whole family of projects!

Just look at the multiple layers of awesomeness: commissionning very experienced typographers to design an original brand and interface font family for screen and print with wide coverage of major scripts beyond the usual Western scripts (Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic) along with plans to extend it even further via a global internship program. With all this serious work to be released under a community-approved license allowing wide modification, redistribution and re-use in tune with the Ubuntu ethos and in respect of Ubuntu's and Canonical's trademarks.

It's very encouraging to see all the attention, energy and resources dedicated to design and language coverage issues in the Ubuntu community: "Every computer user should be able to use their software in the language of their choice" as indicated in the Ubuntu philosophy are not empty words!

A big kudos to all involved!

The community as a whole has made a lot of progress in this difficult area over the past few years (decade?), look at this previous post when Mark was challenging the community to help tackle the font challenges!

And if you didn't know already about the work done for the visual identity Ubuntu has been using until now: there is Andy's Fitzismon's Ubuntu-title with various branches from the community but the new project will reach much further.

3 Mar 2010

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 15:25:17 GMT

Support the Libre Graphics Meeting

Do you enjoy using a range of libre graphics software, including open fonts and all the tools forming the open font design toolkit?

Then please consider supporting the upcoming LGM: the major yearly event where the community of developers and core contributors for libre graphics software come together. Your support will help even more useful interaction and progress to happen during the LGM to the benefit of the wider community.

For details see the create wiki and of course the preparation efforts by OSP (this year's organizer).

17 Feb 2010

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:32:16 GMT

Firebug and webfonts

Good to see the re-designed Firebug website using the Titillium open font in its CSS.

Now what about getting these handy web developer tools (including Webkit Web Inspector, Dragonfly and even whatever the IE equivalent is) to give designers more control of the font-related CSS elements as we see increased usage of webfonts?

13 Feb 2010

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:31:57 GMT

Open fonts for signage

After Andy fitzsimon's Road Stencil looks like another open font font for signage has been recently released by Matt McInerney: it's called Allerta, it looks really good and the release zip file even contains a vector file for the physical spraying kit! Follow the signs to your destination...

13 Feb 2010

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:01:28 GMT

The League of Moveable Type reformulates parts of the OFL FAQ

Good to see the League of Movable Type explaining some important aspects of using the Open Font License, the license they have chosen to standardize on as a community of designers: covering key subjects such as allowing modifications while retaining artistic integrity with the name change mechanism, how credits and acknowledgements are handled (although of course copyright statements and notices should never be removed), the choice of a font-specific community-recognized software license over a Creative Commons approach (see the explicit FAQ entry on this) and how authors always retain the full rights to re-release their creation under a different license including a more restricted one.

They also point to the OFL FAQ for further answers to questions designers may have as they use and release font sources under the OFL. The FAQ should be clear enough, with various practical tips and examples for open font designers. If you haven't already take a moment to read it. We will update it as needed.

6 Feb 2010

Sat, 6 Feb 2010 17:15:09 GMT

fontforge support for WOFF

At the request of Chris Lilley from W3C's font activity (among other things), the amazing George Williams has now implemented WOFF support in fontforge. It's available now in CVS but in a release near you probably soon. Thanks Chris and George for your efforts in this area!

A good way to use the new web native format and to view/handle the corresponding metadata.

3 Feb 2010

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 20:49:53 GMT

Hiring type designers

Ahem, IMHO the very talented folks at Weta should hire a few type designers to work on quality original fonts in tune with the style of a story and avoid being ridiculed by the interwebs for falling back to overused fonts (Papyrus-like AFAICT) for lettering and subtitles in multi-million-dollar productions...

3 Feb 2010

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 20:21:54 GMT

Awareness of font embedding issues

Good to see increased awareness of font embedding issues and the serious need to use fonts which explicitely allow it when you want to do it.

Fontforge offers an Embeddable dropdown and tick boxes in its font information panel to view the fsType - and modify it if you have the rights to branch the font - as well as an os2_fstype object accessible via python.

You always need to make sure to check the embeddability rights associated with the font you want to use. Of course when the designer has chosen a licensing model which explicitly allows embedding like the OFL then no need to worry.

But people wishing to use open fonts under the GPL need to do due diligence of checking what happens there... What with the experimental font exception and its problems...

3 Feb 2010

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 12:54:23 GMT

Libre alternatives to closed ebook platforms

Are the telescreens-like platforms really inevitable? Do we really want authors, publishers and readers to allow computer vendors to push everyone towards Farenheit 451-style book and content control? Do we want the electronic tools with which we read and learn to be stuck in some remotely controlled read-only mode?

Thankfully, there are existing alternatives to the various iWhatever sirens luring people into tinkering-hostile fully DRM-controlled platforms: FBreader to read and manage your ebooks, Calibre and Sigil or epub-tools to create them. All these you can install today on existing platforms. It's worth pointing out that the ePub open standard can also take advantage of the flexibility of @font-face.

Check out the ePub Zen Garden.

Let's not give up our ability to read what we want, keep it and/or share it even with complex writing systems the market does not care about for whatever shiny new device locked down to one single profit-oriented provider.

29 Jan 2010

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:55:44 GMT

@font-face in Firefox 3.6 firstrun page

After the Firefox 3.5 release notes with only a small mention of all the work done on supporting webfonts, it's good to see the Firefox 3.6 firstrun page actually making use of webfonts via @font-face: in this case a non-modifiable font family from FontShop in the web-native WOFF format which enjoys support from many foundries, IOW peace has broken out. (see the related utilities.)

Webfonts are certainly one more step forward for the open web! While many may well prefer fully libre/open fonts instead of freeware fonts you cannot modify to suit your needs, it's already incredibly useful to be able to go beyond the old basic "web-safe" set. Go ahead, spice up your website with some quality webfonts!