I have made a new generic poster for upcoming events in 2012. It can be easily printed and photocopied as it is made in Libre Office (ODF) format.
Download the PDF and the complete sources (ODF + Fonts)
It is in English, but please feel free to translate it. A Portuguese translation was made for the events at the University of Aveiro by Pedro Amado. Thanks Pedro!
It’s been a while since I last posted some opinionated crap. How could that possibly happen? 
Last week Bitwig folks finally announced upcoming beta of Bitwig Studio, a new commercial DAW for Win, Mac and Linux. As it often happens, some folks in the community started speculating how this is going to affect existing free software and the community itself. After all, it’s not that we’ve got huge teams slaving away to make music production a breeze on Linux, eh?
Well, one thing I really liked in the LAU thread is that most folks who cared to comment didn’t express extreme views. I seriously hope that it’s a sign of the community becoming mature enough to treat things in a relaxed, no-fanatic way.
What I’ve been seeing on the desktop layer is that free/libre and commercial software can perfectly coexist without kicking each other in the nadgers and turning half the city to ruins. Just a few examples:
The only fluctuation I can think of is the 8 years old story with Jorg Anders overreacting and abandoning NoteEdit after hearing about a, frankly speaking, fantom possibility of Finale port to Linux. And he started NtEd few years later anyway. That he doesn’t get much acknowledgment for NtEd either is a whole different story.
And even if you could recall all the epic OMG!Ubuntu threads about likewise phantom possibility of Photoshop port for Linux, you’d soon figure out that most people who expressed their interest weren’t going to use GIMP anyway. No love lost.
So if you think that some proprietary app suddenly available for Linux is going to do BLOOD NEEDLESS VIOLENCE GUTS OUTSIDE CITY TAKEN OVER DEAD BODIES ALL AROUND to your favourite free application, stop worrying. Fire up that free app and do something awesome with it. Work on your skills, become damn good at using free software, and then share what you know. This is how you become your own John McClane.
Ubuntu 11.10’s ‘alternative’ installer gives the opportunity to set up software RAID-1 as part of the system installation. It works, but there is a caveat: you may find that when you install Grub the installer wants to put it on both disks. I think this may be because the Grub installer’s a bit confused about the whole RAID thing. You can tell it which disks to install on (choose the first) and as far as I can tell it will then go onto the RAID-1 partition (and hence both physical disks) OK.
Incidentally I've got the RAID set up across the whole of both physical disks, by having the whole of each marked for RAID and then when this change has been committed to the partition table allowing the installer to auto-partition the single virtual RAID volume which then appears in the list of volumes. I found that I had to reboot after creating the virtual RAID volume. The installer was being sulky and failing to create all the partitions; second time around it read the new partition information and created the partitions on the virtual volume perfectly.
EDIT: See also http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11463430&postcount=7 which seems to tally with my thinking
If you read about RAID on Linux you get an awful lot of slightly out of date information, especially around HOWTOs which are dauntingly complicated if-then-else-not affairs with modification dates five years and more in the past.
It’s not that uncommon to find this kind of document-rot: sometimes it means nobody who is anybody is using the technique any more. That could be true for RAID in a world of cloud-based redundancy. I think there is another explanation, because Ubuntu is pulling in lots of users like me who set up machines real and virtual several times a year but don’t specialise in it and so do not like having to do complex non-standard installs. I think that Ubuntu’s alternate install installs software RAID just well enough that the docs are redundant.
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="225" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/33802215?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="400"></iframe>
Chile Tipográfico – english subtitles from Krft.tv on Vimeo.
Marco Avilez kindly sent me a link to this great little documentary about typography in Chile 
Ricardo Santos has kindly uploaded some photos from the type sketching workshop at Escola Superior de Artes e Design last week in Caldas da Rainha.
Thanks to Ruben, Ricardo and Natanael for inviting me to do the workshop!
Dave Crossland will be running 2 type sketching workshops in Portugal this month, one at the Escola Superior de Artes e Design in Caldas da Rainha (ESAD CR) on Thursday 5th January and one at the Department of Communication and Art at the University of Aveiro (DeCA) on Monday 9th January (more details here). Please email dave@understandinglimited.com if you are interested in these events as spaces are limited and attendance is gratis
Another Amiri font release in less than month (release early, release often ;). The main feature of this release is brand new bold and bold slanted fonts, so now we cover the four common styles, though more work on polishing them still needed. Check News file for more detailed changes of this release (Arabic, English)
I just dropped News Cycle 0.4 onto the internets. Right now the deets are all at https://launchpad.net/newscycle/trunk/0.4 — why wait? If you haven’t yet decided to click on that tantalizing new link, I’ll now explain why you should.
First, News Cycle is (of course), my open font revival of the classic ATF News Gothic from 1908. In 1908, News Gothic included the Basic Latin character set, and that’s pretty much it. The previous (0.2) release of News Cycle added to the original via a greatly expanded set of accents and extended character blocks, covering a large swath of Latin Extended-A and Latin Extended-B.
This release continues to expand on the original, and adds two new alphabets: Greek and Cyrillic. There have been proprietary versions of News Gothic released by commercial foundries in the past that included one of these alphabets or the other, but as far as I can tell, News Cycle 0.4 is the first open source News Gothic to provide coverage for them. In theory, they should look unified and coherent when mixed together with Latin. That’s not inherently easy for someone who has very little experience reading Greek & Cyrillic languages, so by all means, if you have feedback, please send it.
I’ve also tried to learn a teensy bit more about OpenType funnery in this development cycle, so version 0.4 also includes “text figures” — aka, Oldstyle numerals. I also updated many of the punctuation and non-alphabetic characters, and just cause I felt like it, added a nice selection of mathematical symbols (although they are limited to the symbols one would use to write in-line equations and expressions; complex and scaled symbols are a bit outside the scope). Plus there are one or two easter eggs which I don’t feel like looking up at the moment, so let them serve as awesome little surprises.
The kerning was done by Igino Marini through his iKern service. Hinting & instructions are autogenerated. It is possible that I’ll be able to use ttfautohint to get better hinting; if so that will be made available in an update. Right now you can download TTFs and OTFs from the Launchpad project page. News Cycle is also provided through Google’s Web Font library, although there will be a delay before the new version is served up there, because the company does rigorous testing.
I’m currently working on bold; more about that in a week or so. Although … if you’re dying of curiosity, I did add the -Bold SFD to the Bazaar repository at Launchpad. Don’t be alarmed when you open it, however — I’m starting with the regular version of each glyph and emboldening them one-by-one. There aren’t that many glyphs done yet.
Yet another Amiri font release with yet another jump in version number, this time to mark the move from alpha stage to beta stage :) (my versioning scheme makes no sense, but so is life).
Too lazy and too tired for screenshots and other fancy stuff :p, so here is the release notes:
Amiri 0.100 (2011-12-04), beta gamma delta
------------------------------------------
* This release marks another important developmental milestone, with Arabic and
Arabic Supplement blocks in Unicode 6.0 being fully covered (which means
essentially any Arabic character in Unicode can now be presented with Amiri).
Also the font has now matured to great extent and is usable for most of
typesetting tasks.
* New styles:
- Add a slanted style that slants to the left and no to right, to follow
Arabic writing direction.
* New glyphs:
- Subtending marks (U+0600-0603).
- Arabic date separator (U+060D).
- Arabic poetic verse sign (U+060E).
- Honorific marks (U+0610-0614).
- Dochashmi Heh (U+06BE and U+06FF).
- Bari Yaa (U+06D2 and U+06D3).
- 4 sizes of Kashida.
Fixes:
- Fix issue with Kashida breaking word shaping in InDesign.
- Slant Urdu digit four to look more acceptable.
- Fix disappearance of media Khaa dot when preceded by Kaf, as in كخا.
- Decrease the hight of initial Lam when followed by Haa and Meem, as in
لحمد, to match other Lam glyphs.
- Finjani Ayn and closed Haa when followed by Kaf.
- Lower small Waw after final Heh.
- Widen small Waw and final Alef when a Madda mark is applied to them.
- Increase side bearings of many dotted glyphs no avoid clash with their
neighbours.
- More wider forms of glyphs to avoid mark clash when fully vowelled.
- New contextual shape for initial Ain followed by Raa, as in غر.
- New contextual shape for final Alef preceded by Kashida, as in عمـان.
- New contextual shape for final Yaa when followed by open Heh, as in نهى.
- New redrawn initial and medial Kaf that do not clash with their neighbours.
- New redrawn final Waw that is more faithful to the original design.
- Disable, by default, lowering Baa dots when preceded by Raa or Waw, moved
to stylistic set 01.
- Disable, by default, contextual form of medial Meem when followed by Alef,
moved to stylistic set 02.
- Digits are now tabular, removed tnum feature.
- Common punctuation and European digits are now from Crimson Text.
- Change the default interline spacing to fit better for regular text.
- Many more smaller fixes here and there.
po/fr.po was done and tested using gobby in a hotel lobby over a wireless network. There are much better workflows out there but this ad-hoc method was helpful. 
This new book presents the thesis Dr Cyril Cannon submitted in the early 1960s to the London School of Economics, studying the social conditions of compositors in London at that time; it has been extended with an epilogue, a revised bibliography and an index. As such it represents a valuable addition to published literature on how people were grouped and organised at work and how they positioned themselves socially based on their working conditions. It is also a useful addition to writing on print history, particularly as the subject is introduced with a historical review going back to the beginnings of letterpress printing in the middle ages. Unknowingly Dr Cannon was writing within twenty years of the end of a five hundred year old trade. The clues were all around, but those he interviewed remained largely oblivious (just as you might expect, in fact).
I was unable to work over the summer as I had a broken wrist so there was some irony in the fact that instead I sat in front of InDesign typesetting this 304-page book with the good hand! The design, which proved assured and suitably understated, was by students in the Typography Department at Reading and the type is Celeste. As the book has relatively few images we were able to use Festival Offset as the text stock which bolsters the finely chiselled characters of Celeste; I’m currently reading the excellent John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: lives in art by Frances Spalding (OUP, 2009) which has a much larger number of halftones and is printed in a Garamond-like face on thin silk stock, making the type hard to see if light reflects off the page. We’ve done better; the design and specification combine to make a very comfortable read (though I would imagine we spent a lot more per sheet on paper).
An enjoyable task in a good cause. And naturally you can order the book through St Bride Library’s online shop or buy it in the Library reading room!
In July, we started a three month collaboration with Dave Crossland working on the Open Font Library website. The main goals were the website redesign and information re-structuring for version 0.4 of OFLB.
From the start we’ve been documenting the process on our blog, sharing our daily doubts and achievements.
We started with sketches and mockups for some of the ideias we wanted to develop. The CSS styled font specimen, our very first post, is an example of one of these ideas. As we tested some approaches and received feedback, we settled on the visual direction for the project. Dave made the suggestion to log our progress in our blog, and so we did — here’s the full list of posts:
Looking back to all of these, we can see the progression from early experiments towards more solid and final ones.
Besides the redesign, we worked on the interfaces for font browsing and previewing, as well as the font family page. These went through a lot of rethinking and refining in the mockups. Once we moved to the Aiki implementation, we had to adapt our structure to the existing framework, along with many tweaks to our original plans, in order to end up with a good version of our design idea thanks to the help and support of Fabricatorz, who added a group of new features to the existing OFLB framework.
We’re close to the website launch, and we have to thank Dave Crossland, Robert Martinez, the Fabricatorz and all others who provided valuable insights, suggestions and corrections regarding our designs along the way.
We’ve been prototyping typography features for better integrating Inkscape with FontForge. Today I have published on YouTube a screencast of the current version of these extensions. The extensions are scheduled for release in the upcoming Inkscape version 0.49.
The basic workflow is split in 3 steps (with one Inkscape extension for each step):
1) Setup Typography Canvas
Using this extension you can define the general metrics of the font you’re designing and have the Inkscape canvas properly setup: the paper size is adjusted to 1024×1024 units and guidelines for baseline, x-height, caps-height, ascender and descender are created.
2) Add glyph layer
Now you can design your first glyph. Each time you are satisfied with a glyph you can use the second extension to create a “glyph layer”, move the selection to the newly created layer and auto-hide it so that you have a clean canvas to work on your next glyph. You can, of course, at any moment toggle the visibility of any of your previous glyphs at the layers dialog so that you can either tweak it or use it as a reference while you are designing other glyphs.
3) Converting to SVG Font
Once you’ve designed all of your desired glyphs, you’ll have to use this third extension to convert the glyph layers to the SVGFont format, which is what FontForge is capable of dealing with.
After these 3 steps you can save your SVG document and load it in FontForge to continue the typography work.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w5e0BVOsrc8" width="420"></iframe>
Please leave a comment on this blog post with suggestions about how this could work better for you, or if you have any questions about what you can do to help move development of this tool forwards!
As LGW owner and primary contributor I’m supposed to be neutral to various projects and try to be at least in good relations with everyone. That, however, doesn’t mean that I should like bigotry.
I haven’t covered Oyranos and related apps in a while simply because I found it increasingly difficult to explain why anyone would need them in real life, except ICC Examin which is a nice ICC inspection software (fails to work on Intel GPU, but that’s another story). However, the more I observe the whole colord/oyranos situation, the less I wish to have anything to do with Oyranos. Here is why:
I don’t think it’s likely we’re ever going to see any interoperability between the colord and Oyranos projects in the future. Not for any huge ideological reason, but just because the feature overlap of the two projects is too small. Colord is of very limited scope, is installed by default and tries to make things just work. Oyranos is a project of huge scope that wraps many other libraries and tries to be involved in every part of the color workflow. It’s kind-of orthogonal to what colord is trying to be, and that’s the main reason I chose to start a new project rather than trying to fix Oyranos.
Note the courteous tone.
What counts today is a very different understanding about, what makes a good colour management system. The colord author has failed to meet many criteria and was so far not very cooperative to accept some very common demands from various people in the colour community…
Beside that I believe, Oyranos is from a architectural level much better designed, because it relies as good as possible on existing standards, which colord does not care about.
Here is a clue. Colord is catering to Linux users who want color management to just work and not be pain in the arse. Oyranos is trying to work on all possible platforms and support all kinds of workflows. Which is why colord is now becoming mainstream (recent Fedora and Ubuntu relases have it), while Oyranos can mostly be found in the upcoming new version of OpenSUSE. Hence the bitching.
This kind of childish behavior is precisely the reason I’m getting less and less involved with some projects lately.
Libre Graphics World has published an article covering the new Inkscape Measurement Tool that we (Felipe Sanches and Dave Crossland) have been working on. It is planned to be included in the upcoming Inkscape 0.49 release.
Their nice video demonstrating our new feature is embedded here but be sure to read their article too.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XDu2pRIi0AA" width="560"></iframe>
Felipe Sanches has been working on a new Inkscape Measuring Tool, and here is a preview of its current state:
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behdad.org is blocked in Iran these days, I went ahead and made my Iranian calendar thingy available at taghvim.info. Let me know if it doesn't work.
Halloween is here - what a fun time of year! The pumpkins are carved and the seeds are roasting in the oven, a chill is in the air, and all the little monsters are busy planning their best tricks and hoping for excellent treats. With all the trick or treating & costume planning, why not add some Halloween spirit to your website as well? We're happy to publish 4 new, fun, and scary fonts this week that are sure to provide a spoooooky feel for your website!
We would love to see how creative you can get with these fonts - please let us know where you are using them in the comments of this post, and we'll send out a Google Web Fonts T-shirt for our favorite!
Its ghastly! Its gory! Its gruesomely gleeful! It's Creepster Caps, the blood-curdling new font from Squid and Sideshow. This fright-filled font has so many alternates its like stitching together your own monster every time you use it. Creepster Caps: perfect for all of your grisly graphic needs!
Eater Caps is a display font infected by the darkest of rare disease that slowly spreads at night while the webfont user sleeps.
Nobody knows where Nosifer Caps comes from. It emanates a dark stench as it drips from the internet.
Butcherman Caps is a zombified display font, hacked and chopped and left for dead, yet still crawling!
Posted by Posted by Dave Crossland, Font Consultant, Google Web Fonts
While developing typography features in Inkscape, we (Felipe Sanches and Dave Crossland) decided to approach the task by gathering input from our user-base, based on user experience studies. We want to record the users trying out the new features we are working on and based on these recordings, figure out which aspects in our software needs further improvement. We tried to use all of the free software screencasting tools we found, but none was good enough for the task. The best one we found is part of GNOME Shell, but still need some improvement.
Up to now we added webcam support to the GNOME Shell Recorder (a core component of GNOME 3) and implemented a DBUS API for it so that it can be configured and triggered by other applications. And we are starting to work on GNOME Screencast, a new tool for GNOME 3.4, similar to GNOME Screenshot, that will allow the user to configure the screencasting parameters and start/stop a recording. More details are available in the GNOME bug tracker in the bugs 660203 (core screencasting functionality) and 661426 (GNOME Screencast tool).
Features for GNOME Screencast planned to be implemented before January 1st include cursor highlighting, so that the mouse pointer visibility in the screencast recording is enhanced by rendering a transparent coloured circle around it. We’ll also optionaly render a graphical representation of cursor and keyboard events such as mouse clicks and key strokes, respectively, which will be useful for the audience to better understand what goes on in the input devices in a given screencast.
This is an example of a screencast recorded with the current development versions of GNOME Screencast and GNOME Shell:
<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CVDTl-uzLOM" width="420"></iframe>
Type hinting is a time consuming process in the type design workflow.
For this reason many existing fonts are launched without it.
To solve this problem Werner Lemberg is proposing a new tool: ttfautohint.
If you want to help to make web typography better contribute to the project at: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/15816
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អ្នកប្រើប្រាស់ទូរស័ព្ទ Android អាចទាញយកកម្មវិធីអានព័ត៌មានវិទ្យុអាស៊ីសេរីដោយប្រើពុម្ពអក្សរថ្មីនៅទីនេះ៕
Marina Zhurakhinskaya has been critical to the Women Outreach Program success and happening in recent years, so for that alone she deserves a special mention. That's independent of she being part of the every-awesome GNOME Shell team. Plus, she's so nice and great to hangout with in person.
Stormy Peters wrote in her job application for the GNOME Executive Director as part of her responsibilities to be the "mom". And she delivered! It was a pleasure being on the board when she was in charge. Plus, she's so energetic she brightens everyone around her whereever she goes!
Karen Sandler is awesome in spite of being a lawyer! I have not had the opportunity to work with her in her new role, but at the Software Freedom Law Center, she was a great resource to the GNOME board, and much easier to get hold of than, well, other Free Software lawyers. Now, I did not actually know about her DJ hobby (check her website!) and wedding invitation until today. Waiting to run into her here to learn more :-D.
Rosanna Yuen is hard to find on Planet GNOME, and that's a shame. Many may not know her, she's sometimes better recognized as 
zana. Fortunately she's been making more regular appearance at GUADEC. Anyway, it's hard to imagine anything in the Board / Foundation level getting happened without her back-office work. She moves the money, she keeps the book, she knows what happened in the board five years ago! Plus, sometimes researches and books the venue for Boston Summit too.
At GUADEC this year, and at the Summit today I had the opportunity to meet a few young ladies rather new to the GNOME family: Pat, Kat, Meg, and Nohemi: you girls rock! I hope I blog about you for the years to come!
[Woah, long post! Been a while since I last did that...]
Alexandre Prokoudine Ana Carvalho & Ricardo Lafuente (Manufactura Independente) Behdad Esfahbod Ben Laenen Ben Weiner Danh Hong Daniel Glassey (advogato diary) Davide Viti Denis Jacquerye Eben Sorkin Ed Trager (Haripunchai project) Ed Trager (Unifont.org) Gee Fung Sit 薛至峰 Google webfonts Hiran Venugopalan Igino Marini Karl Berry (advogato diary) Máirín Duffy Nathan Willis Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary) OSP (Open Source Publishing) Pablo Impallari Paul Flo Williams Pravin Satpute Ricardo Lafuente Rogério Brito Simos Xenitellis Understanding Fonts (Dave Crossland and others)