Planet Open Fonts

Felipe Sanches was working on a Google Summer of Code Inkscape project to add SVG font support (and turn Inkscape into a font editor of sorts). Sadly Pango lacks “user fonts” to allow this, but that is slowly coming… Anyway, Felipe just messaged me to say a tiny group of developers received sponsorship from the Brasilian government to travel to Brasilia and meet for a week to discuss Inkscape and GIMP development around ICC profiles and CMYK support. A (portugese) wiki has the UI mockup.

Colour management and CMYK support in free software is a key feature set for professional graphic design, so this is really exciting!

The Give One Get One laptop donation project is going international. For the price of a netbook you get a very nifty piece of open hardware and a great stack of libre software with amazing potential for kids in your family and at the same time you help another child with better education tools. I really recommend investing, contributing and making noise about this education platform...

It was one worst experience ever happened. As described at here and here.

We were not aware of Novell being a sponsor to  the event. (They are still not in the list of sponsors, even they are the only platinum one). I came to know about that only at evening, when i registered for the program. (My workshop on media wiki content editing was at another venue, on the way to main venue, we all went there directly, had not seen the Novell logo till evening.)

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/* General Resources */ Font magazine

/* External Links */ owlsoup

redirect

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/* I want to revive a historic design */

Firstly, to brag about the conference I helped to organise at St Bride Library on 7 November. Entitled ‘Letterpress: a celebration’ the idea of the conference was to bring together people from across the surprisingly broad field of letterpress printing and let them get to know more about each other. We were privileged to get great speakers and exhibitors, sell out, and receive lots of complimentary comments.

Secondly, to mention the new version of the Open Font Library site [current version] which I spent much of October working on. It’s not by any means finished, but it’s looking good; we have worked hard to explain what the site is for and how to get involved, and provided some guidance on font formats and licensing.

Ed Trager is making a character viewer that enables users to get a preview of each font using any one of a gazillion keyboard layouts, so we will be able to go far beyond simply supporting the Latin alphabet. We also have a very simple @font-face CSS rule generator. The credit for the site’s good looks (at this stage of development) goes to my brother James, who did the visual design and wrote the CSS. Internet Dave raised funding for the work and held the project together. To stay up to date with progress, watch this space, or join the OFLB mailing list.

translation tip

There was some great work going on improving the font menu, with Ed Trager's great Font Selection Widget proposal. then with Alberto Ruiz's first mockup then followed by a second one.

What I'm hoping now is that there will be a rebirth of a smart font viewer bringing together features of James Henstridge's fontilus - for which the viewer itself and the thumbnailer have been kept in the current trunk - James Wouter Bolsterlee's gnome-specimen, mrbovinity's serif, Davyd Madeley's gucharmap implementing font tab, Dov Grobgeld's guci, Keith Packard's and Noah Levitt's gwaterfall, and Owen Taylor's hinting viewer.

Improved views at different sizes, hinting and weights, better searchability of glyphs with Unicode goodness, knowlege of which fonts are used, the possiblity to deactivate fallback, more useful font metadata exposed with clickable links...

I could well imagine gucharmap being extended into a Unicode quiz/flashcard language learning tool :-)

Any GTK/GNOME hackers out there want to take on the challenge?

I’m convinced that a lack of fonts is a major barrier to an increase in the amount of content in certain languages on the web. Web fonts would go a long way toward fulfilling the “world wide” promise of the World Wide Web.

I definitely agree with Patrick Hall's Blogamundo blog entry as seen on Planet i18n.

Cyberspace is a great chance for many communities using lesser-know languages. Quite a way to go until about 6972 languages become be first-class citizens... But it's good to hear more recognition of the key role libre/open fonts can play. Thankfully many in the open font community are busy creating and providing quality fonts while the various browsers make great progress supporting font linking. IMHO the fulfillment of the promise of a richer web is well underway.

link to version control on Wikipedia

added comment

s/--/–/

Copy edits; trying to ensure that license stays with font file (as it is a software license) and doesn't play with typeface

s/suggestion/suggestions/

thefontlibrary

Pippin is working on a fun GEGL rig for testing new UI ideas, and one of his ideas is a better UI for Spiros! You can see a screenshot of his prototype’s Spiro UI and I hope this will be a great improvement for Spiro users, and will make its way into Inkscape and FontForge eventually!

[[FontLinking]] moved to [[Font linking]]: spaces are good

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My responses to the TODO list. I've dumped in all the text from the page itself and added comments inline for now

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Literalmente, muchas monedas

El Ministerio de Finanzas de Paises Bajos organizó un concurso para el diseño de una moneda conmemorativa con el tema ‘Paises Bajos y Arquitectura’. La moneda de 5 euros sería de circulacion legal. El ganador fue el artista visual y arquitecto Stani Michiels, quien realizó su diseño utilizando sólo software libre.

Código y diseño

Según puede notarse en su blog, Stani Michiels es un fan de Python y además autor de SPE, un editor y entorno de desarrollo para ese lenguaje de programación y del software de procesamiento de imagenes en lote Phatch.

No sólo ha realizado un interesante recorrido conceptual en este proyecto, también puede leerse como un paradigmático punto de encuentro entre código y diseño, donde el artista (o diseñador) es quien domina la herramienta y no a la inversa.

La moneda tiene en el frente el retrato de la Reina compuesto por una trama tipográfica con los nombres de célebres arquitectos holandeses siguiendo un camino en espiral. Una curiosidad es el ordenamiento de los nombres, ni alfabético ni cronológico, por número de apariciones en internet.

Para graduar los valores de la trama y reconstruir la imagen del retrato, Michiels diseñó su propia fuente paramétrica (!) que le permitía modificar el peso de cada letra.

La otra cara de la moneda también es una reconstrución, pero del contorno geográfico de Paises Bajos, mediante una transformación desde una proyección radial a una lineal, convirtió geografia en cielo y libros en edificios.

Podríamos colocar aqui un sello de ‘100% libre’: Python, SPE editor, librerias PIL y pyCairo, Gimp, Inkscape, Phatch, corriendo sobre Ubuntu y Debian.

Desde el 30 de octubre los holandeses ya disponen de estos frutos del software libre circulando, y segun cuenta el autor “I would have loved to release the coin under the GPL, which could maybe solve the financial crisis”

Más info

• En el post donde Stani Michiels, toda la información detallada (en ingles) del proceso.
• Visto en: understandinglimited.com

When some asks me the template of my slides (most of the audience asks ‘power point template’, and i corrects them telling about OOo) I showed the link to my slides source file and said them to use that for designing. Now, its on air - grab this zip which contains three similar Open Office Impress templates. I don’t really know its right to call so - in fact i just imported some pics to the slide, thats all! The template is under GNU General Public License version 3. The images are designed using Calligraphy Tool in Inkscape - in fact, they are just a lines.

Why Black?

Black is beautiful. My slide rarely contains sentences, instead it contains  collection of words or phrases. For those cases, attention is the best thing required, and the black white contrast is able to make it. And, when background is black - it won’t matter what the screen/wall colour is

Download [Zip contains template, images in png, svg format along with license]

Google’s mobile phone distribution of GNU/Linux, Android, supports non-DRM web fonts via @font-face, and the OpenMoko Freerunner now runs Android (Youtube Video 1 and Video 2).

Fábrica de Fallas

• 15 y 16 de Noviembre de 14 a 21 hs
• La Tribu - Lambaré 873
• Entrada Libre y Gratuita
• El programa completo aqui: Programación

“Hay una leyenda urbana que cuenta que en 1947 se produjo un error en
una computadora causado por una polilla que se había metido en ella.
Para algunos, allí nació el concepto de “bug” para denominar un
error en el software.”

“Como una fábrica de fallas, el festival, propone entrecruzar ideas y
experiencias vinculadas a la cultura libre y el copyleft justo cuando
ellas dejan de ser una simple manera de producir e intercambiar
cultura y se transforman en un modo de habitar el mundo y vincularse
con otrxs. Un espacio de encuentro, intercambio y producción que
reune ideas y experiencias vinculadas a la cultura, la comunicación y
la política.”

“Música, software, cine, radio, libros, pintura, fotografía,
comercio justo, web, tierra, semillas y conversaciones.”

Programación

Conversaciones.

• Entrevistas exclusivas y en diferido con refentes de la cultura
  libre. Richard Stallman (FSL), Jimbo Wales (fundador de Wikipedia),
  David Bravo (Abogado y activista español, especialista en licencia
  libres), entre otros.

La Copiona. Una computadora que almacena temas musicales liberados
por sus autores. Vení, elegí música, copiala y llevátela.

Consultorio. Si traes tu compu, CaFeLUG y Ubuntu Argentina te
instalan software libre y te enseñan a usarlo. Si ya lo tenés
instalado, te resuelven tus dudas.

Cine. Proyecciones de cortos y largos liberados por sus autores. Si
traes un DVD virgen, te los llevás de regalo.

Feria. Diferentes colectivos muestran, venden y comparten sus
producciones libres.

Radio. Radio libre en vivo de 18 a 20 hs.

Fotogalería. Muestra colectiva de fotografía libre. Si traes un CD
virgen, te las llevás de regalo.

Abuelas Microsoft No. Degustación y distribución de las recetas que
el imperio nos negó. Para comer, beber y compartir ingredientes
secretos. Con la presencia de VodkaMiel (Compartiendo Capital)

Música. Durante toda la tarde música libre. Si traes un CD virgen,
te la llevás de regalo.

El sábado por la noche, sigue la música en el bar de La Tribu.

Idea y dirección general: Colectivo La Tribu

Producción: José Massón, Leandro Monk, Ramiro Cosentino, Luciano
Rossi, Marilina Winik, Colectivo La Tribu.

Mobile platforms which use webkit-derived browsers already have support for @font-face CSS font linking: iPhone with its Safari Mobile edition and Android via its own browser component as you can see on Kai Hendry's photostream where he successfully gets a stylesheet calling Andika Basic to work.

Hopefully Mozilla's Fennec (in alpha) will soon offer similar support for the Maemo and OpenMoko platforms.

The film Twenty20 produced by actor Dilip’s production company Graand Productions for AMMA [ Association of Malayalam Movie Artists] as a fund raiser for the association is the first ever Malayalam movie containing all super stars in Malayalam and most of the members in industry. The film contains Mammootty, Mohanlal, Suresh Gopi the most prominent figures of Malayalam film industry in fairly equally important roles. The film also considers a role for more than 60 Malayalam cine artist, which includes some one with role, some one just for fantasy and some one seen just in a flash.

The film which is designed in a way, as to provide roles for everyone is 100% an entertainer. The film never tried to give equal importance to all by providing equal number of dialogues or same heroine instead it just plotted one to the apt role, even it reminds the old roles performed by them.

As expected the film was never a collection of characters cropped and glued, instead a story is there behind the film, and a wonderful pattern of narration from the Director Joshiy. The film and the narration is centered to Mohanlal, whose performance is awesome as usual. Mammootty, who also shares an important part in the screen also played the role in amazing manner. The man who needs a special applause is Suresh Gopi, who shines again in police uniform that makes the story to a real thriller. Jayaram, Kalabhavan Mani, Dilip, Madhu, Manoj K Jayan, Indrajith, Sidhique, Mukesh, Jagathy, Salim Kumar and Sukumari also had done those small roles in neatly. And some one mainly young stars like Pridviraj, Kunchako, Jayasurya became just dancers for a cameo song by Nayantara. (How to provide that much role, its a question!)

The major part of the film is screen play, dialogues and direction. Though the story contains nothing new, the way of narration without stressing much to super starts and moving through incidence makes it interesting, while the dialogues, specially crafted for the stars, makes the movie a crispy one. And on the case of direction, its done by Joshiy and its a perfect Joshiy movie.

The major drawback seen for the film are two - the poster design is simply manipulation over the I am Legend poster. Cross examine here Twenty20 and I am Legend Can’t you make your own poster?

The second drawback is the three songs, simply bore to hear could be nominated to this years worst music trophy, though the visualization is done is a good manner, and the Nayantara’s pub song, is one among the best ’such’ song Malayalam ever had.

The movie is simply an entertainer, and has nothing to be new in it.There are certain stunt and some over heroism, still it is fine to watch as a whole movie. And if your are one who celebrates movie watching, enjoys Mohanlal in mundu, Mammootty performing in front of the court and of course get thrilled when Suresh Gopi splashes dialogues with English h words, arrogantly to his superior - this film is one for you. It is never a money loser and surely a mile stone in Malayalam film industry.

Hats off to the makers.

Besides Ed Trager's amazing font playground (a new version is in the work), I've enjoyed playing with Richard Ishida's Unicode pickers like the IPA one, creating word clouds with Jonathan Feinberg's wordle or admiring the colourful shapes of Ricard Marxer Piñón's Caligraft.

I find it very cool to see the functionality of these webapps being improved by the availability of open fonts like Gentium, Doulos SIL and many others in the background. Open fonts for an open web or something :-)

To all my friends who were able to vote:
THANK YOU!!

The american cultural export was nearly dead to me, and now I’m totally inspired.

lets rock and roll~!

Hace un tiempo hicimos referencia al curso de inkscape Logo a Logo, escrito por ‘Joaclint Istgud’. Ahora, hace pocos dias, Joaclint inició una Red Social para Inkscape en Ning. No hay muchos lugares de encuentro para los usuarios de inkscape en español actualmente, es importante generarlos. En los foros de Gimp en español hay un foro para inkscape, pero era hora de tener un sitio ó comunidad propia. En los grupos de Ning hay foros, blogs, galerias de imagenes y un montón de herramientas muy útiles que pueden usar quienes se anoten.

Esperamos que su crecimiento sea rápido, ya nos hemos anotado y publicamos por ahi un mini-tutorial sobre ajustes de interletrado y posición de caracteres para textos en inkscape.

Siguiendo la filosofia libre con la que se desarrolla inkscape, seria deseable que esto promueva la creación de contenido publicado bajo licencias compatibles con obras libres entre los diseñadores y artistas, como las que cumplen con la definición de freedomdefined.org, o las licencias CC que llevan el sello ‘Aprobado para Obras Libres’.

While embarking on the multi-year journey to draft the OFL and coordinate the expert and community review of the license, we analysed the needs and the existing models, how they worked and how people reacted to them. With feedback from the community we made a list of features which are crucial for good font licenses and tried our best to condense them all into an ideal model for both users and designers to build upon.

These key features are:

• use, study, modification, redistribution (the 4 core freedoms)
• bundling
• embedding and its interaction with possible strong or weak copyleft requirements
• derivative outlines and artwork status
• derivative fonts status
• artistic integrity
• anti-name collision
• name and brand protection
• reputation protection for authors
• preventing stand-alone reselling within huge collections
• descriptive changes of modifications
• clarity and readability for designers
• awareness of the software nature of fonts
• the multiplicity of font source formats, some open and human-readable and some opaque/binary
• good integration with the font design toolkit
• legal solidity through wide expert and community review
• metadata integration
• cultural appropriateness to both the type and FLOSS communities
• stable trustworthy working model with a non-profit as the steward of the license
• being reusable and not project and .org-specific
• allowing linking in a web context (more recently)

There are of course differing views along the licensing spectrum but if you take into account the specific needs of collaborative font design then your criteria may well be in tune with the elements above.

With these criteria in mind, and taking into account the need for reducing licensing proliferation, where do existing font licensing approaches fit in? The following list has some of the existing licenses used for fonts out there along with some quick comments about problems the specific approach may have.

Don't get me wrong: for other uses many of these licenses are brilliant and do a fantastic job and I don't want to ignore the efforts by the corresponding authors or maintainers but with hindsight it seems there are probably better ways to release a font under a free software license.

• Public domain: no rights reserved not even attribution, unclear under various jurisdictions which makes it problematic for a global license, fairly often found to contain elements from restricted fonts where copyright has been stripped
• Utopia license: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• AFPL: Alladin Free Public License: deprecated and rejected as non-free by FSF and Debian
• Various Creative Commons combinations: designed to be used for content and not software
• Baekmuk License: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• Hershey font license: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• Liberation Font License: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• GPLv2 without exception: causing problems with embedding and satisfying source requirements
• GPLv3 without exception: causing problems with embedding and satisfying source requirements
• LGPL v2: confusing in terms of satisfying redistribution requirements
• LGPL v3: confusing in terms of satisfying redistribution requirements
• Bitstream Vera agreement: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• Lucida Legal Notice: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• MgOpen agreement: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable, a variation of the Vera license
• Arphic Public License: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable, very closely modelled on the GPL, some clauses are odd in the context of font design
• Design Science License: meant for data and not software: not endorsed by the FSF
• Mincho License: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable

If you know about font designers wishing to release their creations under a community-validated font-specific license, then I'd recommend you point them to the OFL FAQ and use the Go for OFL campaign materials to advocate a common license which many in the FLOSS community believe caters better to these needs.