Planet Open Fonts

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.

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...

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...

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.

Μιλήσαμε πρόσφατα για τα στατιστικά χρήσης του Firefox στην Ελλάδα. Αυτή τη στιγμή έχουμε νέα στατιστικά που συμπεριλαμβάνουν και τον Ιανουάριο 2010.

Με βάση τα στατιστικά στοιχεία από την υπηρεσία statcounter.com, ο Firefox στην Ελλάδα έχει φθάσει για πρώτη φορά το 45% στο μερίδιο αγοράς λογισμικού περιήγησης του διαδικτύου, ξεπερνώντας τον Internet Explorer.

Είναι εξαιρετικό νέο, και συμβαδίζουμε με άλλες χώρες όπως τη Γερμανία με το να χρησιμοποιούμε ελεύθερο λογισμικό και Firefox.

6 comments

I’ve attended SERIAC (the South Eastern Region Industrial Archaeology Conference) for the last three years and enjoyed it every time. It’s also very good value at £12.50 for a day of talks that invariably span the whole field of industrial archaeology but remain understandable and interesting. This year it’s hosted by Surrey Industrial History Group at Chertsey Hall in Chertsey on Saturday 24 April. The programme is online; all the talks look genuinely interesting. Hope to see you there.

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!

One provocative omission from the excellent Textpattern CMS is subsections. I don’t know why it was omitted (probably just because it was out of scope when Dean Allen sat down to write TXP). Now that there’s a codebase, fitting in subsections is slightly tricky. There’s a need to adjust the way that URL rewriting works and there’s also a need to rework the section admin form. I could really do with having this sorted and I have started to scope it out. If somebody would like to sponsor the work let me know ’cos I haven’t got time to do any more for nothing.

Yes, I have investigated what’s out there. It is not good enough, I’m afraid: for one thing, it is susceptable to break with every minor point release. Something better is needed.