1. Gnome and Ubuntu had good reasons: DejaVu fits the bill when you want a free Verdana for text and terminal, but the design isn't made for UI or branding. Ubuntu is significantly nicer to look at than something using DejaVu. 2. There were no obvious ways to contribute because open-source tooling either didn't exist or was something you didn't want to use (Fontforge I'm looking at you) -- the latter is why the Ubuntu font was made in a proprietary design application and only later converted to an open UFO workflow. For the longest time, the industry standard way of producing a production font binary was Adobe's closed source font development kit that got mostly open-sourced a while ago. Hinting was something you wanted to do in Microsoft's closed source VTT application instead of writing assembly in Fontforge. The UFO and designspace specification, base open-source libraries like ufoLib, defcon, ufo2ft, fonttools with all its underlying sub-libraries, etc. and tools like ttfautohint, fontmake and friends are all relatively recent developments. The font landscape is different today to what it was even just years ago. Things are getting better :) _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
