Planet Open Fonts

Cuisinières électriques ET?OU ordinateurs

2012-02-05T23:04:56Z

Encore une histoire de “et-icien”/”ou-icien” et encore une nouvelle raison de faire de la cuisine dans OSP! Bernard Vaudour -Faguet, “Histoire des cuisinières électriques et des ordinateurs”

Is Linux ready for the future?

2012-02-04T22:07:23Z

Someone just started an awesome thread at linux.org.ru where he shared his experience of sending his GNOME3 driven Linux system to the future by means of… force-changing the current date. I thought I’d translate and share it Everything below is a translation.

I read an [old] article on habrahabr.ru about how Windows 7 worked after a bug in BIOS that sent the guy’s system 14.000 years forward. That got me interested — how would my favourite system [Linux] work in such a case? So I opened clock configuration tool in GNOME and started adding years.

Max possible date turned out to be 258337. Looks like that’s when the world ends.
Gnome Shell clock stopped working (showing up on the panel) after the first 10K years leap. Anyone cares to report?
Linux thinks that once in 20K years you still should change your password. After each time leap I had to ‘sudo passwd’ for the user, otherwise the GUI for changing date/time in GNOME couldn’t get superuser privilegies.
Of course, everything related to HTTPS stopped working, because all certificates expired.
LibreOffice Calc couldn’t calculate the current date, outputting “Error: 511” instead of the value in a cell. And after the first 10K years jump it couldn’t really load the user’s profile.
Google Chrome simply refused opening my Gmail account because of the expired certificate and didn’t even suggest to “Continue anyway” . Epiphany, however, worked just fine in both 10.000 and 260.000 years and only warned about insecure connection in the address bar. Google Chrome also failed to load the user’s profile (history, bookmarks etc.) in 200.000 years.
VirtualBox freezed when starting a virtual machine and in general started very slowly. Which is why I couldn’t figure out what Windows would really do in the future.
GNOME’s screenshot utility suggested “Screenshot-(null)” name instead of the usual “Screenshot-$DateTime”.
The rest of the system worked surprisingly fine (which is more than what could be said about Windows 7 from the habrahabr.ru article). Nautilus, Pidgin, Epiphany, console tools: all of them managed to display and use six figure dates.
Google promised 10^308 Mbyte free space for GMail.

To sum it up: Linux is ready fo the future apart from LibreOffice, some proprietary tools and the Gnome Shell clock.

After going back to the present the system experienced a kernel panic. It’s the first time I ever saw how all four CPU cores went out one by one on Linux, btw, and the disc activity stopped only after the last one. After that I rebooted from a flash drive, ran fsck, booted the system. So far it works just fine.

កម្មវិធីដំឡើងពុម្ពអក្សរខ្មែរសម្រាប់ទូរស័ព្ទ និងកុំព្យូទ័របន្ទះរបស់ Samsung

2012-02-02T09:14:20Z

ទូរស័ព្ទ និងកុំព្យូទ័របន្ទះរបស់ក្រុមហ៊ុន Samsung មួយចំនួនមានលក្ខណៈ FlipFont ដែលអនុញ្ញាតឲ្យយើងបន្ថែមពុម្ពអក្សរដោយពុំចាំបាច់រូត (root)។ ដូច្នោះហើយលោកអ្នកអាចទាញយកកម្មវិធីនេះ ទៅដំឡើងដើម្បីអានព័ត៌មានភាសាខ្មែរ សរសេរសារជាខ្មែរ។

កម្មវិធីនេះបានសាកល្បងនៅលើ Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, Galaxy 7.0 Plus និង Galaxy Tab 10.1។

ទាញយក

ក្រោយពេលទាញយករួច ចម្លងយកទៅដាក់ក្នុងទូរស័ព្ទ ឬ SDCard។ ហើយធ្វើការដំឡើងធម្មតា។ ប៉ុន្តែត្រូវចូលទៅ Setting->Application រើសយក unknown sources ជាមុនសិន។

របៀបប្រើ៖

១-លោកអ្នកត្រូវមានទូរស័ព្ទ ឬកុំព្យូទ័របន្ទះរបស់ Samsung ដែលដំឡើងប្រព័ន្ធប្រតិបត្តិការ Android 3.1 ឡើងទៅ។
២-ចូលទៅ Settings->Display->Font style។
៣-រើសពុម្ពអក្សរ “Khmer”។
៤-បិទម៉ាស៊ីន រួចបើកឡើងវិញ។
៥-សាកល្បងចូលទៅគេហទំព័រនេះ http://khnews.info/testing.html
៦-ដើម្បីសរសេរខ្មែរបាន លោកអ្នកអាចស្វែងរកក្ដារចុចនៅលើ Android Market ដែលមាន Phum Keyboard ឬ MultiLing Keyboard។

កំណត់ចំណាំ៖

អក្សរខ្មែរបង្ហាញត្រឹមត្រូវតែនៅក្នុងកម្មវិធីរុករក (web browser) នៅលើ Android ពីកំណែ 3.1 ដល់ 4.03។

រូបភាព៖

Events in Guatemala

2012-02-02T06:30:02Z

Download Poster PDF

UPDATE: 2012-01-04 NEW SCHEDULE FOR USAC BELOW (NUEVO HORARIO PARA LA USAC)

Dave Crossland will be doing lectures and workshops in 4 locations in Guatemala:

Sábado 4 TEC z4
15:30 – 17:30 Conferencia: Why free fonts? (¿Por qué las fuentes libres?)

Martes 7 Universidad Rafael Landivar (URL), Auditorium
17:30 – 19:00 Conferencia: Libre Type Culture (La Cultura Tipográfica Libre)

Miércoles 8 Universidad Rafael Landivar (URL)
07:00 – 09:00 Conferencia: Free Culture Law (Las Leyes de la Cultura Libre)

Miércoles 8 University of San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC) Facultad de Arquitectura
15:00 – 16:30 Conferencia: Libre Type Culture (La Cultura Tipográfica Libre)
17:00 – 19:30 Type Sketching Workshop (Tipo de Dibujo Taller)

Fonts cannot be shared and when they do not work right, you are not allowed to fix them. Making your own typefaces is
a black art, hidden in mystery.

A long time ago software pro-grams were the same, but the free software movement has freed the knowledge, the tools,
and the business of software.

Now it is time to free fonts. Dave Crossland reveals how to design typefaces using only libre software—and how to earn money doing it.

Las tipografías privativas no se pueden compartir, y cuando están mal, no se pueden componer. Hacer tu propia tipografía es un arte oscuro y envuelto en misterio.

Tiempo atrás el software solía ser igual, pero el movimiento del software libre liberó el conocimiento, las herramientas y el negocio del software.

Ahora es tiempo de liberar la tipografía. Dave Crossland revelara como diseñar tipografías, utilizando software libre y haciendo dinero con ellas.

Para asistir al evento, el correo electrónico de dave@understandingfonts.com

How to butcher a good text

2012-01-29T21:37:02Z

So you want to write an article. But what if people actually try reading it? What if they (oh, the blasphemy!) understand a good part of it?

No way Jose! You didn’t spend hours doing a research for everyone to understand it. If you made an effort, people’ve got to show some respect! The’ve got to spend as much time on reading it as your spent on writing it. Or else they are cheating.

Tired of people cheating on you, my fellow blogger? I’ll show you the way forward. Then left, right, left, left again, forward, right, upside-down, inside-out, left… Nearly there!

The Core Concept

Forget it. You are a man of ideas, are you not? Put as many ideas in your text as you can think of. Don’t separate them. Instead, let them tie in crazy knots like a headphone wire in your pocket.

This is your ideal text visualized:

The Navigation

Huh? Navigation is for sissy girls. You write stuff only for the deserving who are tough enough to dig through ten layers of crap. In other words:

Never use headings. Train of thought may do Brownian movements, but that’s no reason for stopping.
Use inline lists. Because the colon was invented for a reason, dontcherknow.
Put as many hyperlinks in your text as you can think of. Take that, Wikipedia!

The Text

Write long, very long paragraphs. People’ve got to see you put some work into it!
Right after those very long paragraphs use very short ones, no less that a single sentence. After all, you are not a monster.
Nevertheless, most of the content should be made up of sentences with no less than 3 levels of nested complexity. Solve the puzzle, sukkas!

Illustrations

Eeeek! That’s abomination unto machismo. Make it a wall of text. No treacherous image should sneak in! Guard the perimeter!

On a second thought, you can get some extra points for making people go through illustrations with gritted teeth. Just use a really psychodelic color palette for all the diagrams and never ever put a legend on.

Tables

Yeah, baby. This is where you can go nuts. People may think you wear underpants on your head, but I say use long tables!

In fact, make all of your text a table. And put some nested tables in. I mean, aren’t all geniuses crazy? That must be it!

Conclusions

If you follow these simple instructions, few people will read more than 1/10 of your article. This is how your gain a true following of the like-minded! And with luck everyone will just skip your text! How cool is that?!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: uh, oh, this sukka broke every rule he listed. Does the bugger ever follow his own advices?

And that’s my point exactly: never follow your own advices. This will only make it more interesting!

OSP public meet

2012-01-28T16:41:55Z

January 30th Finally a moment of meeting with you for 9000 km of drawings, tools, stories. Interested in the libre? Curious about our practice? OSP studio welcomes you for a first public session at Variable. 18h30 – Welcoming Presentation and discussions around recent and ongoing OSP studio works. 19h30 Exiled Cuisine (Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexico [...]

Generic Poster for 2012 Events

2012-01-26T21:13:36Z

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!

Die Hard 5: with kernels

2012-01-19T18:05:39Z

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:

Bibble Pro (Corel AfterShot Pro since last week, btw) didn’t make any existing free software die. Instead we got darktable.
A month ago BrainDistrict announced PaintSupreme. Can you see Pinta folks crying in despair, because noone’s gonna use it again?
BrainDistrict has also been resurrecting MainActor, and yet commits to Kdenlive, PiTiVi, Novacut and OpenShot keep piling up.
Renoise didn’t kill any free software project, and they even added support for DSSI, a (currently outdated) free API for virtual instruments.
Mixbus folks have been contributing to upstream Ardour project for a couple of years now already, and aren’t they proprietary guys?
Loomer is busy porting their commercial synths and effects to LV2, the state of the art free API for virtual instruments and effects.
linuxDSP started with Linux support from ground up and has been supporting LV2 since day one.
..and the list can go on.

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.

Resolved bug in Rachana font

2012-01-16T07:19:25Z

Just resolved one bug of Rachana font.
Below is list of Malayalam Unicode characters

"ം ഃ ഄ അ ആ ഇ ഈ ഉ ഊ ഋ ഌ ഍ എ ഏ ഐ ഑ ഒ ഓ ഔ ക ഖ ഗ ഘ ങ ച ഛ ജ ഝ ഞ ട ഠ ഡ ഢ ണ ത ഥ ദ ധ ന ഩ പ ഫ ബ ഭ മ യ ര റ ല ള ഴ വ ശ ഷ സ ഹ ഺ ഻ ഼ ഽ ാ ി ീ ു ൂ ൃ ൄ ൅ െ േ ൈ ൉ ൊ ോ ൌ ് ൎ ൏ ൐ ൑ ൒ ൓ ൔ ൕ ൖ ൗ ൘ ൙ ൚ ൛ ൜ ൝ ൞ ൟ ൠ ൡ ൢ ൣ ൤ ൥ ൦ ൧ ൨ ൩ ൪ ൫ ൬ ൭ ൮ ൯ ൰ ൱ ൲ ൳ ൴ ൵ ൶ ൷ ൸ ൹ ൺ ൻ ർ ൽ ൾ ൿ "

Before fix it was looking like, Note, U+00AE character is displayed even at reserved unicode locations, was not understanding from where ® is coming after checking through all font understood in Rachana.ttf these glyphs present.

After Fix

Reported bug : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=781938
patch is available in bug. Pushed update to Fedora 16 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/smc-fonts-4.4-7.fc16

Grub installer confused when preparing a software RAIDed Ubuntu 11.10?

2012-01-12T22:45:00Z

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

Aside

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.

Meaningful Transformations

2012-01-12T10:20:26Z

A conversation with Tom Lechner We discovered the work of Tom Lechner at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels. Tom has traveled from Portland, US to present Laidout, an amazing tool that he made to produce his own comic books and also to work on three dimensional mathematical objects. His software interests us for [...]

Typography in Chile

2012-01-10T11:22:26Z

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

Caldas Workshop Photos

2012-01-10T11:18:33Z

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!

Web Fonts, now more compressed

2012-01-09T22:01:13Z

One of Google’s core principles is that "fast is better than slow", and the Web Fonts team takes that to heart. We’re always looking for ways to make web fonts load faster, and that’s doubtless a key factor in our rapid user adoption. Today, we are announcing a new way to make web fonts smaller and faster, in collaboration with the Monotype Imaging Fonts.com Web Fonts team. Google Web Fonts now implements Monotype Imaging’s MicroType Express compression format, which yields an approximate 15% savings in file size over using gzip alone. This change will automatically speed up Google Web Fonts for Internet Explorer browsers (version 6 and up). We’re also actively working to offer improved compression with other modern browsers, including Google Chrome.

We’ve kept the interface simple, so designers don’t need to update their integrations in any way — we’ll automatically upgrade the CSS snippet and font files so that site designers and visitors get their fonts faster. We’ve done this for previous speed optimizations as well, such as automatically stripping the hints (metadata used for improving rendering quality on Windows) when serving fonts to Mac, iOS, and Android clients. We expect that most future optimizations will also be automatic and transparent.

Monotype Imaging has agreed to make MicroType Express available to the public at no cost; the license can be found at monotypeimaging.com/aboutus/mtx-license. We believe it’s friendly to both open source and proprietary implementations.

Today, we are also releasing an implementation of MicroType Express compression as part of the Embedded OpenType converter in the open-source sfntly library, adding to the existing WOFF compression. The sfntly library, developed by the Google Internationalization Engineering team, serves as the core conversion engine in Google Web Fonts for subsetting, hint stripping, and related functions of our dynamic serving path. We hope that all web font services, as well as people hosting their own web fonts, will use sfntly to optimize font serving across the web.

We are proud to be working with Monotype Imaging, and we look forward to learning more from designers, users, sites and other partners to advance the state of web fonts together!

Posted by Raph Levien, Engineer, Google Web Fonts

Workshops in Portugal, January 2012

2012-01-03T16:42:15Z

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

In preparation: Research meeting Co-position

2012-01-02T13:41:29Z

Over at the Libre Graphics Research Unit we are preparing a second ‘Research Meeting’ that will take place in Brussels from 22 to 25 February 2012. Developers, designers and theoreticians from all over Europe will gather to imagine future Libre Graphics tools together. The theme for this particular edition is Co-position, and we’ll speculate about [...]

Added Bengali language support in Indic typing booster

2011-12-28T14:27:16Z

   Finally done with Bengali support for indic-typing-booster, working from last 5-6 days, actually we could have done this yesterday itself but initially i thought probhat (mostly used in community) is phonetic layout like itrans but later understood it is one-to-one mapping layout. So thought its better if to add phonetic layout as well since mostly new user find phonetic layout more user friendly.

   Hunspell word list made life little bit easy, but its huge wordlist around 3Lakh (.3 Million), not sure how much actually useful for Booster IME. If we can delete few words not related or very similar it can help to reduce Database size. Will discuss this in Bengali community and will take some inputs.

   Unlike first released of other language, from onward User no need to install all layouts rpm together, done sub-packaging in spec file. Users familiar with Probhat should install bengali-typing-booster-probhat, users familiar with inscript should install bengali-typing-booster-inscript and phonetic one should install bengali-typing-booster-phonetic. Considering db size hoping this will help to reduce download and install size. Rpm's are available at koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3608241, scratch build. Raised Fedora new package request hoping to get quick review and build it for Fedora 17 and Fedora 16
   This is Beta release 0.9.0, with some bugfixes and comment will release 1.0.0 soon.

Amiri font v0.101

2011-12-27T22:23:44Z

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)

Samsung Galaxy Nexus នៅស្រុកខ្មែរលក់តម្លៃប្រហាក់ប្រហែលនឹងទីផ្សារអន្តរជាតិដែរ

2011-12-26T09:31:46Z

នេះជាប្រភេទទូរស័ព្ទប្រើប្រព័ន្ធប្រតិបត្តិការ Android 4.0 អាចប្រើភាសាខ្មែរបាន។

លក់នៅហាងទូរស័ព្ទ Hakse តម្លៃ $650។

Screen

4.65" HD(1280 x 720) Super AMOLED
Contour Display (curved glass)

Features

Battery: 1850mAh
OS: Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0)
CPU: 1.2 GHZ dual core processor

Might

2011-12-13T13:13:05Z

Our friends Nadine and Überknackig have opened a nice place, the Might shop, just a few hundred meters of our Variable house using the Crickx font at its full potential!

interpunctie samples all.pdf

2011-12-12T23:45:45Z

From Thursday 20th to Sunday 23rd November OSP went to contemplate the Bolwerk archives landscape from the window of Frans Masereel Centrum. As part of Bolwerk‘s residency, we were invited to propose a reading of Bolwerk’s material inbetween its punctuation. Linked to our actual and future projects, this journey also presented itself as a good [...]

0.4 He’s a jolly good fellow

2011-12-12T17:29:47Z

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.

Amiri font v0.100

2011-12-04T15:20:42Z

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.

Better rendering, expanded language coverage – and other notes.

2011-12-02T13:03:20Z

Yet a new and also a final version of the roman in the 4 weights is coming. This version takes advantage of the last 6 months of research and experience testing rendering in the large group Google web fonts that … Continue reading →

28 Nov 2011

2011-11-28T10:28:03Z

Updating FontForge's localization into French

A few weeks ago, as part of a booksprint on libre/open fonts, some of us started to update the French translation of FontForge, the libre software font editor. Fontforge uses GNU gettext and the UI translation documentation outlines the methodology for getting the messages updated and tested.

This was driven by the need to make the terminology coherent and to illustrate various chapters with screenshots in French for Fontes Libres a book written in French on libre/open fonts and related topics. This book effort has been made possible thanks to FLOSS Manuals fr and the financial support of Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.

We built upon the previous translation work done by Pierre Hanser and Yannis Haralambous. Interestingly enough, much of the needed translation of 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.

There is still a lot left to translate but things are on their way and I hope this can get finished soon and submitted for inclusion upstream.

One more way the wider community will benefit from this booksprint !

Lending a hand for The Compositor in London

2011-11-24T09:18:00Z

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!

Wikimedia hackthon 1st day

2011-11-21T11:05:07Z

Amazed with the passion and spirit of wikimedia team during hackthon. Eric gave good starting explanation of basic things of wikimedia and other ongoing activities, such that offline support, mobile support, internationalization.

Hackthon project list was excellent http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011#Topics

I was interested in all but since all activities were parallel thought better to check Lohit fonts support for remaining Indian languages.

I was the leader for font testing activity http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011/Schedule_notes#I18N
Glad to see 4-5 hackthon attendees shown there interest in font testing.

Pre lunch session went in introduction of project, group forming etc. Actual work start after lunch.

first 1 hrs i was just enabling students OS for Indian language, couple of had Fedora in there machine so did it quickly, santhosh helped for enabling Ubuntu for Indian languages.

It was great to see there expression's when they actually started writing in Indian languages. One of attendees (Jatin) father works in CIIL :)

Then explained students important of activity they are going to do, then finally we started.
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/LohitFonts This is the page where finally we put all the testing reports.

In between we had good offline discussion regarding Lohit Tamil fonts, Discussion with Amir regarding on 1 language 2 script problem.

Ended first session with Group Photo http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Hackathon_Mumbai_2011_Groupshot.jpg

Reglo

2011-11-18T16:28:15Z

We used Reglo Bold for the new identity of Radio Panik and we are happy to release it today on the OSP foundry under open source license

My 1st day at Wiki conference at Mumbai university

2011-11-18T13:38:14Z

First thing notices is the security, did not allowed anyone without checking it photo ID and wiki invitation, even inside university there was good security. (Many Police)

Later understood this is due to controversy created by BJP http://www.newsreporter.in/bjp-youth-activists-detained-for-protest-against-wikipedia anyway that's other part.

From last couple of days seeing excellent coverage by media for wiki conference(even there was new in local Marathi language newspaper Sakal) and same noticed even in conference. First row was mostly occupied by Media.

University convocation hall was small compared to COEP Pune conference hall, it proved land/space crunch in Mumbai. ;)

Met with Ramki and Santosh and introduction with wikimedia developer. I was interested in attending tech talk session but seminar hall was full, even few people sat on ground. So went outside and had good discussion on indic computing issues and plan for hackthon. Problems and development of Lohit fonts.

Attended Post lunch session about introduction of wikipedia, in that understood wikipedia also facing same problem, we faced 1 year back, one language multiple script, so asked question regarding same in Q&A. I think they are planning good to transliterate language content of one script to another script, so it will save lots of effort and will help people knowing either of language. Since limited time decided to take further discussion offline, so will discuss more in tomorrow's hackthon session.

From couple of session i attended wikipedia made it clear regarding there high priority task is to provide fonts, input method for at least 22 official languages of India. It is like providing food. cloth and shelter Only few are missing though, i am working on this from last 1-2 year and my dream to announce sometime "Fedora now support all 22 Indian languages", only 4-5 language support is remaining now major part is testing and confirming the support, so in tomorrow's hackthon planning to highlight this testing points. If any bugs raised i am definitely there to fix. I am sure withing next 5-6 month we will able to announce support for 22 Official Indian languages.

Second part was discussion with the attendees, met with dhananjay Aditya, saw him while discussing regarding adding pali language contents in wikipedia with "Alolita sharma". I am also very interested in doing something for Pali language, we have lots of great Buddhism content available in Pali language and high time to digitize it. Had good discussion with Dhananjay he is very passionate regarding Pali looking forward to work with him together in between Dhananjay is Admin of "Superstition Eradication Committee" http://www.facebook.com/groups/ansindia/ and very active in many activities.          Was interested in showing i18n development, specifically Marathi language to IBN lokmat representative Amruta, gave 5-10 explanation to her. Lets see if anything happen positive for raising awareness of Open Source indic language computing activities.

OSP in Designblast 2011

2011-11-16T15:23:21Z

OSP is invited to talk on friday at Designblast’11 — Toys, Tricks & Tools — 18.11.2011 “Is it better to restrict yourself or to allow everything?” Stand up talk by OSP Canal Historique. An open code to Love, Destiny, Fate, Passion, Rage, Pain, Fulfilment. With explicit pictures and language. On 17/11/11, we’ll do a day [...]

Extensis plug-in now supports Google Web Fonts

2011-11-16T00:07:08Z

Do you use Photoshop® to design your website? Looking to spice it up with cool web fonts like Lobster or Dancing Script? Well, now you can do that and more (with over 280 font families) using Google Web Fonts right in Photoshop®.

That’s because, today, Extensis has added support for Google Web Fonts to their Web Font Plug-in for Photoshop®. Now, the entire catalog of Google Web Fonts is only a click or two away!

In addition to making the entire catalog of Google Web Fonts easily accessible, the plug-in takes advantage of the full power of Suitcase Fusion 3. This means that any web fonts you choose to use for your designs are automatically kept up to date, and fully activated as needed. For example, this makes it easy for you to send your Photoshop® files around to your coworkers and not worry whether they have the font(s) installed — it will "just work"!

The free Extensis Web Font Plug-in for Photoshop® can be downloaded now, from: webfontplugin.com

Posted by David Kuettel, Technical Lead, Google Web Fonts

OFLB: Putting it all together

2011-11-14T18:18:53Z

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.

Typography extensions in Inkscape 0.49

2011-11-14T17:55:54Z

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.

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!

Zero tolerance

2011-11-13T21:10:29Z

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:

Colord developer on Oyranos:

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.

And now Oyranos developer:

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.

Relearn

2011-11-12T15:32:20Z

Un essai en plusieurs parties, écrit pour ∆⅄⎈, la nouvelle revue des éditions BAT. 5 ans après le début d’OSP, il est temps de faire un point sur les influences sociales des logiciels libres sur notre pratique du design. Aussi disponible comme fichier pdf: Relearn Le texte est écrit à plusieurs mains, sur plusieurs plates-formes, et [...]

Warming up the house

2011-11-10T17:37:52Z

Housewarming October 14th 15:00 onwards / Constant Variable / Rue Gallait 80 Brussels The 19th century town house at Rue Gallait 80 is now known as Constant Variable. For three years, it will house an arts lab for free, libre and open source software. Next to the Open Source Publishing studio, there is an open [...]

Video-demo of the Measurement Tool in upcoming Inkscape 0.49

2011-11-08T16:52:25Z

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.

Fudcon second day

2011-11-06T06:39:12Z

    It was excellent day, unfortunately was not able to attend till last session. Started with the session on Fedora security, it was interesting and definitely fedora user felt proud to see effort of security team.

    My session with Anish was from 2 to 3 PM at seminar hall 2, started bit late since it was experience from first day that audience need some time to change rooms. It was about 20-25 audience but good part was most of them were interested in doing something for Indian language computing.
    Session was very interactive. following questions were raised during session.
    1. Can we add barah layout support? i think yes we can
    2. Since same data used across different users, is there any chance is privacy issues? No. since each user will have separate user db saved in his home folder
    3. is this available in debian? still not need one packager, but still one can install and use it on ubuntu and debian easily since ibus is already there.
    Best part was when in session after showing demo and architecture we asked regarding Advantages of Booster ime, audience able to tell its advantages perfectly.
    Sessions slides are available on fudcon.in.
    Outcome: Had good interaction with all. Decided some project to work with students. Looking forward to sometime visit COEP again and actually work on some task with student.
Thanks fudcon for giving me this opportunity.

Excellent first day at Funcon 11 in Pune!!

2011-11-04T13:02:16Z

    Jared smith gave excellent talk on Fedora and motivated lot to student to come forward and start contribution. He explain just using in not means contribution to community but one should come forward and report bugs give some feedback is taken very well.
    Saw many desktop powered by Fedora 15, gnome 3 :)
    Amit shah's session on git was very interactive and i think it was required some more time but yes he managed well in available time.
    Had a small running chat with Jared smith, briefed him on Fedora indic i18n activities and number of Indian languages and script. (Lohit fonts). Will be good if tomorrow get some time i can show some demos to him.
    Met with Prof Abhijit (COEP) was interested in meeting him from long time. He is great supported and promoter of opensource. I had meeting with some of his project student working on Gnome Terminal indic rendering stuff. Had a nice talk on indic language computing project. There is still lots of things to do and that also interesting for Computer science student. Will give show project demos and plan for some project tomorrow.
     Big news came after lunch with the Inauguration of fuel website, it is done by Satish Mohan. There are many open task for student do go through it if one wants to learn and contribute in opensource.
    Attended talk Vaidik kapoor's on how development of Fudcon.in happened Case study was great and overall excellent work in limited time. I am sure we will do great next time and can use same experience for other such events. COD with Drupal is really excellent module for developing event website. Liked this session.
    Last talk of Aman was nice, He explained Fedora QA process very nicely. Still i think there need some motivation for students to test and reports bugs for Fedora. May be in Fedora new somewhere name regarding the person name with number of bugs he reported.
    My session is tomorrow and very excited about it.

Pravin Satpute
Fedora i18n team

Preview of the new Inkscape Measuring Tool

2011-11-03T17:22:35Z

Felipe Sanches has been working on a new Inkscape Measuring Tool, and here is a preview of its current state:

3 Nov 2011

2011-11-03T09:43:10Z

FLOSS Manuals booksprint on libre/open fonts

Thanks to the efforts of the FLOSS Manuals francophone team: namely Elisa Godoy de Castro Guerra and Cédric Gémy, a bunch of us with some knowledge and experience of libre/open fonts are getting together for a few days to do a booksprint on the topic (with the necessary funding provided by OIF).

It should be really interesting to use agile methods to work together on a book to explore this very rich and diverse subject.

A great opportunity for me to discuss and write up in a more structured way thoughts and corresponding best practises on the key issues from the various talks given at FLOSS conferences these past few years. They have been sitting idle on my hard drive for too long...

The resulting book written in French will be released under a libre license and join a growing collection of books (manuals) in various languages such as: Français, English, Suomi, Nederlands and فارسی Farsi .

Looking forward to meeting the other authors and to the whole collaborative writing experience!

Custom font in Windows Phone 7.1

2011-11-03T02:18:31Z

វិធីបង្កប់ពុម្ពអក្សរប្រើការបានតែជាមួយម៉ឺនុយទេ ចំពោះគេហទំព័រនៅតែមិនអាចបង្ហាញអក្សរខ្មែរបាន៕

Interview with Polish Type Designer Ania Kruk

2011-11-02T22:44:43Z

Ania Kruk is a type designer from Poznan, Poland. She currently lives and works in Barcelona and Google Web Fonts is proud to include her first published typeface, Cookie.

Q: What is your background as a designer, and how did you become interested in type design?

Actually, I'm still a beginner in the world of type design: I have drawn letters for only 2 years. I've recently graduated from the University of Arts in Poznan, Poland. Originally, I studied product design, but after 3 years I found myself more interested in graphics than in furniture.

So I took a one year break and moved to Barcelona, Spain, where I worked as an intern in Estudio Mariscal (which was quite an experience, as they were working on the 'Chico y Rita' movie at that time), and did a one-year Masters in Typography and Editorial Design at Eina, Escola de Disseny i Art.

When I came back to Poland for my last year of studies, I was 100% sure that I wanted to focus on type design.
And here I am now, 3 months after my graduation, with my first typeface to be published: Cookie :)

Q: What is your favourite part of the type design process, and why?

Generally, I'm interested in complex, narrative projects that require creating a whole from various elements (meaning: editorial design, information design, typography). Type Design is not about designing one letter, it's about creating a system: the alphabet.

I like the moment when you can start writing words and sentences with your letters, because then you can actually work on the flow and on the balance between the characters. For example, to make some of them more 'normal', transparent, in order to make others more distinctive or decorative.

Q: Designing a new typeface is a long journey. What inspires you to keep motivated throughout all the different stages?

For sure, Type Design is all about details, that an average user won't even notice, so you need to be patient to do this kind of work. I'd say I'm quite competitive, so when I see other peoples projects and I think 'Wow, that's so cool!', it get's me motivated ;) I spend an awful amount of time digging through the internet, checking out blogs, personal websites, etc.

Q: Can you recommend how other type designers can learn the skills involved in making type?

It's hard to say, because I'm still learning myself. But I'd say that calligraphy and drawing are essential to understanding the construction of the letters.

Q: What do you think could be improved about the type design process?

For me the hard part is hinting ;)

Q: What inspired you to create Cookie?

Cookie is a script typeface, based on brush calligraphy. It has a little bit of the 1950s look, that makes you think about all the beautiful ads and pin-ups from this time. It's sweet and friendly - but not too decorative. I tried to keep it simple and legible.

Q: Did you try to accomplish something specific with this typeface design, and did you succeed?

It's my first script typeface, so the whole design process was like discovering a new way of working. I wanted to create a typeface with a nice flow between the letters, and I wanted the letters to join in a natural way - that's the tough part, if you think about all the possible combinations between 26 lowercase characters. I hope it works ok...!

Q: What kinds of uses are most appropriate for this font?

Its clearly a display typeface, suitable more for titles than main texts. But it can be used for short texts, if you're aiming for a hand-written look. It will look good on an invitation, menu, recipe... poster, flyer or as a header of your blog :)

Q: What are your favourite fonts, and why?

Well, I don't really have any favourites. It all depends on the context and what you want to communicate: a typeface can be perfect for one kind of a job, but look horrible when misused.

There are some surprises: I've always considered Mistral by Roger Excoffon as very kitsch and ugly, until I've seen it in on the opening credits for the movie 'Drive'. It looked just great, combined with the music and pictures.

Posted by Dave Crossland, Font Consultant, Google Web Fonts

"Behdad's Calendar" now available at taghvim.info

2011-11-02T18:43:00Z

Since 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.

2 Nov 2011

2011-11-02T17:20:55Z

Sent from my $DEVICE

Certain mobile devices add their marketing signature by default to outgoing emails. I find this virtual positional goods statement rather annoying, even if unintentionally left as the default configuration. It feels like posturing as well as showing you're unable to configure your device to personalize your own signature and remove corporate ads.

Is the content of your email not discredited by affirming that a $DEVICE is yours, all yours? Does this trigger to compare $DEVICE against $DEVICE bring anything at all? Are you a peon in the platform wars? Especially since I already know what platform and email system you use and can react accordingly?

The best potential comebacks range from sarcastic to constructive:

“Sent from my subterranean luxury bunker.”
“Sent from my $DEVICE… while eating caviar… on a yacht.”
“Sent from my re-flashed toaster.”
“Sent from my microwave oven.”
“Sent from YOUR $DEVICE.”
“Sent through OUR shared interwebs.”

Windws Phone 7.1 អាចប្រើភាសាខ្មែរបានហើយ

2011-11-02T05:40:30Z

Kickstart new fonts!

2011-10-30T17:37:09Z

Google Web Fonts is proud to announce a new funding experiment, using Kickstarter - a popular way to fund creative projects.

Each month there are many typeface designs proposed to our team for publication and financial support. But we can’t support everything! Even with the best quality proposals, it can be hard to decide about those that are quite similar to ones already published. Really the best judge of which web fonts you want to use is you!

So we invited the designers of three recent proposals to try out Kickstarter and see how it works for font projects. There are some fun rewards for pledging a contribution so click through to see the details!

Folk

First is Marcello Magalhaes’ Folk, which transforms the vernacular lettering of Sao Paulo into a font. Already popular as web font, it has been used by The Independent Film Channel and Mozilla - but it only includes an uppercase set of glyphs, and not all the symbols and accents that Google Web Fonts requires. For this project, Marcello will complete the font to the Basic Latin character set, and has designed a poster to go with the new release.

Fast Brush Script

Fast Brush Script is the working name for a font by Pablo Impallari. Pablo's first font, Lobster, is one of the most popular Google Web Fonts, having been served over 2 billion times.

Pablo is offering a very unusual reward - choosing the name! Normally the name of a font is sacred to the designer, but Pablo is opening up the opportunity for corporate patronage of his work. The development name 'Fast Brush Script' reflects the core concept of the typeface. This font is currently in an early development stage with the lowercase letters now fully prototyped, as you can see above, and you can download the current develop version from the Kickstarter project page.

Montserrat

Montserrat is an extremely high quality sans serif text typeface by Julieta Ulanovsky. Advancing substantially during her studies at the prestigious University of Buenos Aires' Masters degree in Typeface Design, the design revives the historical type of the Montserrat neighbourhood where Julieta lives and works.

This genre of type has been a popular trend in recent years and this typeface in particular stands out with its excellent quality. Setting it apart are the set of alternative caps, which add a little fun to a very functional text typeface.

The Google Web Fonts team has already contributed directly to these Kickstarter projects, and we hope you will also become a backer for all three projects as well - let's hope the type designers will be paid far beyond their minimum funding goals!

Update: When fonts are made available in Google Web Fonts, all their source files are also available from the 'Google Font Directory' Google Code Project in a Mercurial version control system, under a free, libre and open source license - typically the SIL Open Font License.

Posted by Dave Crossland, Font Consultant, Google Web Fonts

កុំយកពងមាន់ជល់នឹងថ្ម

2011-10-30T11:42:39Z

មនុស្សផ្លែល្វា

2011-10-30T11:39:58Z

Scary Fonts For Halloween

2011-10-25T04:38:43Z

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!

Creepster by Sideshow

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 by Typomondo

Eater Caps is a display font infected by the darkest of rare disease that slowly spreads at night while the webfont user sleeps.

Nosifer Caps by Typomondo

Nobody knows where Nosifer Caps comes from. It emanates a dark stench as it drips from the internet.

Butcherman Caps by Typomondo

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

ទឹកភ្នែកក្រពើ

2011-10-24T08:42:37Z

លោក ចូវ អូន អត្ថាធិប្បាយពាក្យ រាសីដាក់ អារ័ក្ខធ្វើ

2011-10-24T08:40:26Z

ថាច់ ពង្ស សិល្បករខ្មែរច្រៀងបទប្រពៃណីនៅកម្ពុជាក្រោម

2011-10-24T05:45:48Z

UFOs atlas

2011-10-22T22:28:04Z

As attempt to map visually theater activities accross european theater institutions for the Travelogue project, we propose an atlas with three different kind of visualisations.

Building archives landscapes plotter

2011-10-22T14:22:28Z

Invited at Interpunctie project van Bolwerk, we excavate into the 10+ years of archives by building the first bricks of tools to draw a landscape thanks to bash and python scripts + the legacy Fontforge scripting language.

Announcing GNOME Screencast

2011-10-22T01:27:34Z

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:

Soon bodo (brx_IN) locale will be available in glibc

2011-10-20T07:31:29Z

few days back saw note on tdil-dc.in regarding submission on Bodo language locale in Unicode CLDR.

found it www.unicode.org/cldr/trac/browser/trunk/common/main/brx.xml

bug for glibc http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13282

Sanjib Narzary and me working on this. Hoping soon glibc will push in in upstream git repo

19 Oct 2011

2011-10-19T19:48:33Z

A look at the fonts in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich: Roboto and Droid

Plenty of news sources have picked up on today's Android Ice Cream Sandwich SDK release (AFAICT no sign of full source release yet) and among all the various nifty features in this version there's Roboto (Regular|Italic|Bold|BoldItalic) a new font developped in-house, IOW not commissioned via an external foundry. Apparently Christian Robertson is the designer. He is also credited as the author of the AndroidClock font for version 3.1. It looks like an original design (with smallcaps included).

But unfortunately there's no license in the metadata but only the very basic copyright and trademark statement...

IMHO all the smart folks in the Android team should know better than distributing something without any indication of actual licensing, you know it's going to go around the intertubes very fast: just a few hours after the release, plenty of sites offer a download of standalone files which may or may not be a version of Roboto. It's out in the wild but nobody knows exactly if and how you can actually use it, branch from it, etc...

The rather misguided "font data copyright" is still there although fonts are software, the fsType embedding restrictions are set to Preview & Print embedding which will limit various use scenarios of the font, there's nothing in the description field, no upstream URLs and no FONTLOG inside or outside the font. Could do better I guess.

Also in the new SDK I can see that the Droid font family has been expanded with support for Armenian, Ethiopic and Georgian. Great news for users of these writing systems in Android! The Droid fonts now explicitly indicate in the metadata that they are licensed under Apache 2.0 (which wasn't always the case but was thankfully fixed) but today they still have the fsType embedding bits set to Editable embedding which also limits various uses of the fonts. At some point they were potentially going to be available under the OFL as well but apparently this has been put on hold.

So here's to hoping that in upcoming versions the Android team will indicate licensing intent more clearly, fill in the useful metadata fields and fix the embedding buglets in these fonts. Android users and people who may want to use these fonts elsewhere thank you in advance.

18 Oct 2011

2011-10-18T14:16:58Z

Overview of advanced typographic features in LibreOffice

Don't miss the slides of "Towards Desktop Publishing" by László Németh from fsf.hu given at the LibreOffice Conference in Paris by András Tímár.

It's a great overview of all the new advanced typographical features available in LibreOffice.

Awesomely beautiful !
A huge well-deserved kudos to all the people involved !

កម្មវិធីអានព័ត៌មានវិទ្យុអាស៊ីសេរីនៅលើ Android Market

2011-10-16T04:51:04Z

ទាញយកនៅទីនេះ៕