On Fri, 2018-03-16 at 23:31 +0000, Nikolaus Waxweiler wrote: > > DejaVu had already proven at that time fontforge was more than good enough for a complex modern font. > > In the sense that you can write a complex application in assembler, yes. With an assembler full of quirks and bugs. I have used Fontforge, I know why I ran from it and why people have been payed to improve it and not gotten far. > > > That's what the ”professional” mindview gets you: dead projects with no live community > > DejaVu is clearly alive to prove your point. How about this: font > design is different from software development and _not_ the forté of > the open source community. The subpar open-source tooling to work on > these things certainly has not helped. The Ubuntu font was maybe just > good enough for most people. It's kind of ironic that this flies in the face of one of the initial justifications for Cantarell, though: https://thegnomejournal.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/fonts-in-gnome-3-cantarell-tweaking-and-trailblazing/ Interesting quotes from that article: "The commissioning approach to fonts involves a proprietary foundry developing a font family in-house, and then transferring it to a community who will maintain it with a different toolkit and methodology. A fully libre software project approach, in contrast, develops fonts with a FLOSS toolkit on a FLOSS desktop from the start, and hosts and maintains them like other modules in the community’s infrastructure. (In GNOME’s case, those comparable modules would include git, Bugzilla, the wiki, etc.) GNOME is blazing a brand new trail in moving from the commissioning approach towards a libre approach. Jakub “Jimmac” Steiner, designer extraordinaire and core LGM contributor from the earlier days, now also committer to Dave Crossland’s project, had already designed open fonts of his own. He indicated in his blog that the methodology used by Dave Crossland was more in tune with GNOME’s culture and made much more sense in the long- term. They are many challenges ahead but these are interesting times." "Who will be the first to take advantage of the flexibility of the gnome-shell to write extensions specifically tuned to advanced fonts capabilities? Will fonts be the focus of GSOC work as well? Will gnome-tweak-tool be extended to expose more font-related capabilities for the advanced typophile or designer using GNOME? Will some inspiration come fromfontmatrix ? Is a revamping of the font menu widget still planned? Will officially supporting a new language in GNOME include making sure the needed glyphs and behaviors are validated in the official GNOME UI font family? Will the upcoming Desktop Summit—held in Berlin, Germany, a city renowned for the high concentration of typographers and typophiles—push the envelope even further? Will other desktops using freedesktop.org open standards also embark on the project of picking and maintaining their own dedicated visual identity in the shape of an open font? Maybe just in the lettering of their logo?" "Why not pick up fontforge and the rest of the open font design toolkit, learn its formidable feature set and start playing with your own branch of the Cantarell sources? Contributing to making it work perfectly in your own language? Contributing to weight variations? Adding advanced typographic features and smart behaviors? Joining an open font design workshop in your corner of the world? Have fun and happy open font hacking!" It seems like at least the *pitch* was that a large part of Cantarell's justification was "it's going to be a great collaborative open source project that will get lots of contributions for other scripts and stuff, plus it's developed in a more open way than other 'open' fonts". Did either of those really happen in practice? Is either of them likely to in future? -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
