Planet Open Fonts

Hitler Jokes

2009-07-01T11:43:43+00:00

I’m always a sucker for teenage humor:

Web Fonts Arrive! Firefox 3.5 is out!

2009-06-30T19:26:51+00:00

“But we need not wait for epiphanies from those whose paycheck depends on them not having any.” - Dmitri Orlov

Firefox 3.5 is out, and supports web fonts! Grab it from getfirefox.com and tell your friends :-)

play with the playground

2009-06-30T16:03:24+00:00

For long time I did not use the playground because it was not as fun and easy to use after all. When I came back to it to add a few features, I thought I could as well make it fun again! I thought that what prevented me to really enjoy this place was the heavy process to get something on screen. Select a font, select a sentence or type it in the line edit and then push the button and Oh! the thing just goes nowhere you want it to be. So, while it still has some flaws, I redesigned it to act much friendly with me.

Select a font, click somewhere and type!

Pelgrimage to Pragma

2009-06-29T21:34:47+00:00

Designing with TeX: episode IV Today we drove up North to the headquarters of Pragma in Hasselt (NL), La Place from where ConTeXt, a document markup language and document preparation system based on TeX, is being developed. The goal of the journey was to resolve some of the issues we encounter while designing a multi lingual [...]

Dear GNOME developers…

2009-06-29T15:15:34+00:00

What happened to Integrated Media Management for GNOME GSoC project? Was there any real code in the end? Is it going to be used? Where? When?

lettering template

2009-06-28T09:03:05+00:00

lettering template

Picture 001

2009-06-28T08:27:41+00:00

VJ's font

Opening the blackbox of printing

2009-06-27T19:30:51+00:00

When we began to think about how to establish a more rich and warm collaboration with printers after the cold alerts we experienced during OSP production, Georges Charlier’s appetite for research and openness to exotic solutions reappeared in Pierre’s mind. And since we are preparing some new books, it was time for an update on [...]

The Core of the Copyfight

2009-06-26T08:49:25+00:00

Over on the PHD-DESIGN mailing list, Lars Albinsson asked, “In Sweden there is a huge debate on copyrights vs sharing on the Internet. (Swedes managed to both start the Pirate Bay, allegedly the leading peer-to-peer service, as well as introduce very strong regulatory legislation against it.) The trail of the pirate bay people this spring was one of the most internationally covered events in Sweden for years. The pirate lobby also started a political party and managed to get a seat in the European Parliament. There are mainly two sides in Sweden; roughly summed up as: Mainly record companies and some artists claim that the creative industry is dying because of internet piracy; and Other artists, many “intellectuals” and IT industry people claim the internet offers huge potential for creative businesses and people. What are the thoughts on the list about this issue (or issues)?”

As I see it, there are three sides to the “copyfight”: The public, the authors/artists, and the publishers.

Computer networks are built to share data, and the public Internet is the ultimate publishing system. Trying to prevent the public sharing data over the Internet is impossible, unless you create an intrusive police state.

Copyright conceptually starts with everything published being in the public domain. The public then grant authors a limited time monopoly over some aspects of published works in order to encourage publication. Authors do not have a natural right to control their work, this control is granted to them by the public so that the public may benefit. Note that the phrase “intellectual property” is designed to confuse this, suggesting that authors have natural rights akin to physical property rights, and lumping together laws which have almost nothing in common (patents, copyrights, trademarks, database rights, attribution rights, etc). That phrase must be avoided to have a meaningful discussion of the issues it is associated with.

The public used to trade away its natural right to copy published works to encourage the publication of more works, when it didn’t have widespread copying machines. Now that computer networks are here, the copyright bargain makes less sense for most of the public, and it seems they would rather have file sharing - even if this means that there are less works being published, which can not be assumed, although it is asserted by publishers.

Generally the political process of western democracies is dominated by corporate interests, and in this area, by publishing corporations. Therefore while the actions of the public support p2p file sharing, their governments have worked to support publishing companies. The Pirate Party is the end result of this; if the public are disenfranchised by corporate lobbyists enough about some issue, they will start political organisation to oppose the lobbyists.

So the question is, can authors/artists continue to make a living while allowing the public to share complete copies of their works, non commercially, on P2P networks? Or will the public taking back its right to share published works mean that great authors stop publishing new works and do something else?

In 2009 there is plenty of evidence that artists who are independent of publishers can make plenty of money when they respect their fan’s desire to file share; and indeed, there are examples of authors who assert they now make MORE money when the full texts of their novels are posted online.

This leaves little room for publishing companies, since artists are interfacing directly with the market over the net, and since the most famous authors and artists are contractually tied to publishers, as the publishers’ ship sinks, those artists who are going down with them have quite loud voices. However, famous artists are now actively leaving their publishers (Madonna, Radiohead, etc) and implementing the kind of mature and sophisticated “direct marketing” to monetise their works that newer artists who weren’t able to get publishing contracts have been perfecting.

Here in academia, the question is, can academics make a living while allowing the public to share complete copies of their articles, non commercially, on the web?

I suggest that they can.

A quick example: Orion Magazine just came to my attention today (having published an article - in full - about the Transition Towns movement, which I’ve recently started participating in) and the footer of each page explains: “Orion publishes six thoughtful, inspiring, and beautiful issues a year, supported entirely by our readers – we’re completely ad-free!”

Journalists and other professional authors will continue to exist, but their publishing companies and newspapers probably won’t. Many people are now professional bloggers, paid by donations directly sent by their readership and advertising.

(Many thanks to my friends Richard Stallman, who gave a speech titled “Copyright and Community in the Age of Computer Networks” at my undergraduate university in 2004 about these issues, and my dear departed friend Fravia who also practiced what he preached. Thanks also to the countless other thinkers associated with the copyfight who I do not personally know but whose works I have read :-)

Adjustment of a bone under the skin

2009-06-25T11:20:35+00:00

Last LGM and its typographic excitements has brought the DIN – Das Ist Norm – Loch Ness project to the surface of the Saint Laurent river again in a discussion with Denis Jacquerye from Deja Vu. Back in Brussels, we meet Denis in the temporary OSP Studio at Rue de la Senne to begin to [...]

PHP regular expression failing silently due to output buffering

2009-06-24T13:11:00+00:00

I just had a problem where this regexp worked for finding the option with value 'foreign-relations' but not for finding 'economy':

'#(name="Section".*<option value="(.*)" selected="selected">.*</select></p>)#s'

The result was the dreaded PHP blank page. With no errors logged.

This fixed it:

'#(name="Section".*<option value="([\w\s-]*)" selected="selected">.*</select></p>)#s'

The second version is more specific about what string will match in the value attribute and I think that when specified with .* the match filled up the entire PHP memory buffer. If so, it wasn’t logged as an error and that could be because the code here is executed in ‘output buffering’ mode, following an ob_start() call. A guess, but if I am right that might help to avoid a lot of aggravation in future. [nb PHP: not providing error output is Bad.]

Corrections to this assumption welcome!

Cookbook Launch

2009-06-22T05:56:56+00:00

22 June, 16:00 @ Puerto, Varkensmarkt 23, Brussels Join us this afternoon for the long awaited festive launch of the Puerto Livre de Cuisine Kookboek: 70 delicious recipes, written, translated (Dutch and French) and illustrated in collaboration with the inhabitants of Puerto. Puerto is an organisation working from the center of Brussels, where they generously [...]

17 Jun 2009

2009-06-17T16:00:50+00:00

open fonts and mobile devices

The availability and use of all kinds of mobile devices is growing like crazy but what about fonts on these devices?

What happens when the default set shipped with the particular OS is not good enough for you? When the fonts simply look ugly to you or don't provide sufficient support for a language and the corresponding writing system you're using, or you really really want a specific design? You may happen to use the device as an e-book-reader, something to read RSS feeds, do blogging, drawing or whatever, you might also use it as some kind of literacy primer digital chalkboard...

Basically you own the device and you want to enjoy or create content with your preferred font (an open font or not) and not be dependent upon the decision of the creator of the device who may not care about your needs in that area. If you agree that malleability of a device includes choosing and being able to install and use your own font then all devices are not equal: sometime the device makes it very easy, sometimes you have to fight it, hack aggressively the filesystem, reflash, and sometimes you're just stuck. Let's hope that the device makers will come to see the value of allowing end-user font changes. With the pressure of open mobile platforms we can hope the current status quo will improve.

Nokia Internet tablet: flashable, open architecture based on the Maemo which is itself based on Debian components (with only a few restricted components): you easily get access to the filesystem, you can install a terminal application then simply add your font to ~/.fonts and fontconfig will allow you to see it in all the apps. There are also font packages available in the repositories, you can install various browsers, future versions of these browsers will support @font-face.
Android: flashable, open architecture, the Droid font family was commissioned to ship with the device, it's an open font and is hosted under DVCS alongside the rest of the Android source code. The browser based on webkit supports @font-face. You can push new fonts only as part of an application but you don't have access to the system fonts folder. You need to go through the SDK or a dedicated image to push the fonts you want.
OLPC: flashable open hardware and open architecture with a gorgeous screen resolution and a nice ebook mode: the distros running on the OLPC already include a good selection of open fonts, with more in the repositories and you can just put your desired fonts in ~/.fonts/ and fontconfig will do its thing.
Kindle: restricted platform (some patches to the libraries making up the OS are apparently now available but not the system itself): no end-user UI to add new fonts, you need to use a unofficial hack to flash it with a custom image to add fonts with better Unicode coverage. I don't know about the browser features.
Iphone: very restricted platform, a jailbroken one allows access to the filesystem to add new fonts to /System/Library/Fonts/Cache/ and you need to tweak the plist by hand but the browser supports @font-face.
Blackberry: very restricted platform, themes can change the fonts and there is apparently a font folder exposed /system/fonts but putting fonts in there doesn't do anything. Meh.
the various Netbook distros: Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Moblin, etc all these very nice open platforms give you access to the repositories where we already maintain packages for various open fonts. And fontconfig is there too so just a copy into ~/.fonts is fine. The browser with support for @font-face will be easily available.
Sony reader: restricted platform. But apparently a /FONT folder in the filesystem is exposed allowing to add new fonts. Again you need to tweak the settings by hand. No browser is seems.

17 Jun 2009

2009-06-17T13:38:34+00:00

@font-face with Mozilla Firefox 3.5

John Dagget of mozilla has written a good article about various technical aspects of using webfonts with Firefox.

In his example he uses quality open fonts such as Gentium, Scheherazade and MgOpen Moderna. Another font used as an example is Grau Blau Sans: a freeware-don't-modify font but with explicit clauses in its EULA to allow webfonts usage.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels

2009-06-11T08:12:56+00:00

[en français, voir ci-dessous] Next spring, the fifth Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) will take place in Brussels, Belgium. In May 2010, users and developers of Free, Libre and Open Source creative software gather in the European capital for the collective sharing of creativity, innovation and ideas. About the Libre Graphics Meeting The Libre Graphics Meeting exists to unite [...]

Meanwhile in South America…

2009-06-10T18:10:00+00:00

Protests descend into murder following the grant of massive mineral extraction concessions in the Amazon region by the government of Peru.

MyPaint/OpenRaster news

2009-06-08T13:40:30+00:00

To those who were wondering what ever happened to OpenRaster. MyPaint 0.7.0 is out and among other things it now saves to OpenRaster by default. ORA files produced by MyPaint are reported to be correctly opened by Krita and GEGL.

Pour la premiere fois dans ta ville

2009-06-07T14:03:58+00:00

Pierre Normal (pneu) and The Dreams en tournee. 16 June – Strasbourg, Le Troc Café, Rue du Faubourg de Saverne 17 June – Zürich, Kalki, Kalkbreitenstrasse (Palais Chalet) 18 June – Lausanne, Espace Autogéré 19 June – Stuttgart, Club für Flüssigkeiten & Schwingungen 20 June – Genève, L’Ecurie, (Palais Chalet) 21 June – Luzern, tbc 22 June – Genève, Duplex, 波(なみ) [...]

Libre Fonts

2009-06-07T08:40:41+00:00

The Open Font Library is preparing a brand new site (an idea of what’s in store: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki) and this sparked off an interesting discussion about terminology. How to name fonts that are made available on the OFL site? Free Fonts sounds nice, but risks to blur with gratis (and non-free) fonts promoted under the same term. [...]

OSP + Scribus = Prizewinning Design!

2009-06-05T18:36:34+00:00

Yesterday OSP received a Plantin-Moretus prize 2009 for best designed book in the category non fiction. The jury about Cross-over: “It was love at first sight“. The book, published by BAM and Lannoo and edited by Liesbeth Huybregts, uses Libre Fonts and is produced with Scribus and many other F/LOSS tools. We think it is [...]

And the winner is…

2009-06-04T15:08:20+00:00

Future Farmers Free soil

2009-06-04T10:24:00+00:00

A journey through the history and currents of free education, counter-institutional movements and the economy of information in Silicon Valley + beyond. Free Soil presents a bus tour, exhibition, outdoor film/video festival & on-site exchange in conjunction with the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose, California. This tour takes [...]

Print is dying fast, I suspect collapse psychology afoot.

2009-06-04T10:14:14+00:00

TechCrunch reports that the newspaper industry has had an unprecedented drop in revenues in the first quarter of this year.

Print is dying fast. I wouldn’t be suprised if they pretend everything is okay and then one day just turn off the presses; that’s the pattern of collapse

I’m reminded of Mish: “Things that can’t happen, are about to.”

I’m also reminded of my good friend Dr. Thomas Fischbacher, who explained in a recent lecture series on “the econo-energy crisis for engineers” the similar situation in Mathematics:

“God exists, since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists, since we cannot prove it.” (A. Weil)

For a long time, Mathematicians tried to prove that their axioms are ‘consistent’, i.e. never will produce contradictions. At some point, they found that this is a seriously misguided idea: They managed to show that Every set of axioms that allows a proof of its own consistency then automatically also allows finding a “proof” for every possible statement, wrong or not. So, a mathematical theory that succeeds in self-justifying its correctness is worthless, for then it inevitably will be able “to demonstrate both that 2 + 2 = 4 and that 2 + 2 = 4 at the same time.”

At first, this was a surprising result. But it caused Mathematicians to make a transition to a higher state of awareness on what their discipline is about. Knowing what you never will be able to achieve, and why this is a good thing, can be humbling, but provides us with a higher degree of understanding of what it actually is we are doing. The problem with “proof theory” is that many people philosophize about it (in particular: about G ?del’s Theorem) without having a sound idea how it works. This is not what we want to get into here! So, let me emphasize: the link we are about to make with Mathematics concerning the ascension to a higher state of awareness on what we are doing is only an analogy! We do not and can not transplant G ?del’s Tree onto the soil of, say, Politics!

Many people (maybe preferentially in western societies?) search for an all-encompassing explanation of how the world really works. (Hypothesis: Maybe because not knowing makes the human mind feel deeply uncomfortable?) Some of them arrive at a picture of the world which they consider meeting that ideal and then start to prosyletize – to convert others to their belief. The problem with every “I explain it all” ideology is that it provides an explanatory framework that makes its adherents blind to disconfirming evidence. Suppose the ideology is wrong, for some reason. If you can find an explanation for and come up with an answer to every conceivable observation, how would the problems that arise in the application of a false ideology manifest themselves?

As indications of major flaws are never seen for what they are, the only conceivable consequence is collapse – being deprived of all room for manuevre by the clash with hard reality!

BCS helps UK understand personal data guardianship principles

2009-06-03T23:50:00+00:00

The British Computer Society has published a code of practice for people who work with personal data. There are quite a lot of people working with our personal data, and we know that some have been negligent in the past. Government agencies in particular sometimes seem to encourage their employees to burn CD- and DVDROMs loaded with information that they are not allowed to distribute and leave them in public places such as railway carriages; but there are lots of other insidious ways in which such information might pass from legitimate into illegitimate use.

This code digests UK law and provides guidance that to my eye is simple enough for even the most harried civil servant to understand. I hope sections like Responsibilities of the data handler will be pinned up in the offices where those CDs and DVDs are burned. The code may also be of interest to anybody who is concerned about the way that personal data is being collected and used in the UK. Its weakness may be the use of terms such as ‘responsibility’ which seem not to be understood and applied by all of us in the same way.

3 Jun 2009

2009-06-03T18:21:31+00:00

Land art typography

How about using real landscape pictures as your alphabet? An artist from Australia has researched satellite pictures from a well-known mapping site to find artefacts looking like letters of the Latin alphabet. There's also a geogreeting website for you to use the world's letters to convey your message, provided you stay with the simple writing systems :-)

Thankfully there are plenty of other glyphs in other alphabets for you to hunt the maps and continue creating these new kind of world alphabets. Typography at a whole new dimension: lots of fun ahead.

I'm pretty sure our OSP friends who are also into creative mapping would be interested...

3 Jun 2009

2009-06-03T17:49:04+00:00

Automatic font need detection and installation on the desktop

So open fonts for the web are nicely coming together... But what about the desktop side of things?

Well, recent versions of packagekit and pango have introduced a new mechanism for automatic font detection and installation for the desktop. Basically when faced with text containing characters not covered by a font already installed on the system a little dialog will pop up prompting you to install an extra package containing a font covering that character. Pretty nifty.

To try this out:

install Fedora rawhide somewhere
install some extra packages: sudo yum install gnome-packagekit-extra packagekit-gtk-module
activate the gconf key: gconftool-2 –type boolean -s /apps/gnome-packagekit/enable_font_helper 1

Fedora already comes with a good selection of open fonts by default thanks to the good work of the Fedora Font SIG, but try opening the HELLO.txt file in gedit, or copying elements that look foreign to you from the Why can't they all speak **** and you should see the dialog telling you that you need an extra font to support a particular language, asking you to search for a suitable font, offering you a selection of packages before allowing you to install it.

It's a great start so a big thank you to Richard Hughes and Behdad Esfahbod and all the other people involved for their work on this!

For future versions I think the UI should really show more information about the packaged font itself so that the user can make a more educated choice: font family name, foundry, designer, license, along with some classification categories while making some of that metadata clickable.

3 Jun 2009

2009-06-03T16:07:56+00:00

Typographic awareness and misplaced connotations

Great to see a recent XKCD comic contribute in its own wonderful way to the efforts to raise typographic awareness and make more people realize that fonts need to be used appropriately: Papyrus is the new Comic Sans!

I must admit I also twitch when I see Matura MT Script in signs and documents... Ouch, painful!

So please, don't kill your message with a inappropriate font when they are great open fonts out there to choose from which may fit the connotation of your text much better. Spend a little more quality time with your font menu to choose something better...

Gestes Numériques

2009-06-01T14:14:01+00:00

Our colleagues from Open Source Video published a video-registration of the discussion that took place at the yearly Journées du Libre. Enjoy Loic Vanderstichelen, Stéphane Noël, Michel Cleempoel and Marc Wathieu as they present with humour and enthusiasm why F/LOSS is relevant for art- and design education (in French). http://osvideo.constantvzw.org/journees-du-libre-09/

Broadsheet Ballads and a Broadside exhibition at St Bride Library

2009-05-31T20:32:00+00:00

St Bride Foundation is participating in the Story of London Festival this June. Both the Foundation’s education department and St Bride Library are involved; the chief outcome is Broadsheet Ballads, ‘a promenade theatre experience’, in other words a play which is performed as cast and audience move through the streets around the Foundation building in Bride Lane.

The play was written during a four-day project by the Foundation’s Youth Theatre in which a group of young people used their analytical and creative skills to respond to the character and content of broadsides in the collections of St Bride Library. During the Festival itself they will get to see their work presented to public audiences.

The press release, which I quote below with permission, is rather modest about the exhibition which accompanies the show. In fact it will be a very rare opportunity to see some of the Library’s authoritative collection of broadsides, many of which were produced (and sold) in the area where the Library is now. For enthusiasts of ephemeral printing, the exhibition is a must. For others, I would recommend it as a valuable insight into popular culture. The songs and poems, the accounts of murders, hangings, freaks and innovations are worthy of study just as much for their style and content as for their printing and illustration. You will learn a great deal about British popular culture, 19th century style.

Entwine yourself in stories from the past…
St Bride Foundation and Occam’s Razor present Broadsheet Ballads, an innovative promenade theatre experience inspired by St Bride Library’s unique collection of 19th century broadsheets. Join us on a musical adventure as we journey from St Bride Churchyard through the lanes behind Fleet Street, encountering tales from times gone by.
The performance finishes in the Grade II listed, St Bride Foundation, featuring a small exhibition of 19th Century Broadsheets and the history of this fascinating area.
St Bride Foundation is perfectly placed in the City of London, just off of Fleet Street, making it an ideal stop as you work your way towards St Paul’s Cathedral, the Southbank or Covent Garden.
The promenade theatre experience was inspired by 30 young people who researched the broadsheet collection, devised scenes and produced a 30 minute theatrical exploration alongside a director, writer and composer.

A Postcard from Stuttgart

2009-05-30T07:27:58+00:00

I’m in Stuttgart for a week to teach a workshop. In the school library, I read Eye Magazine. The current issue A New Golden Age? has many familiar observations about the way typography is going through exciting times. Sybille Hagman brings up typography as teamwork and the need to divide tasks between experts. Paul Carlos: [...]

29 May 2009

2009-05-29T12:22:10+00:00

Font review tools: assessing and improving the overall quality of our open fonts

A little while ago I updated the Debian weekly font review with help from others in the Debian Fonts Task Force to include all the major font formats, to extract more useful metadata, coverage information, fontlint report along with links to the relevant PTS entries.

There are also good tools to help with standalone font review to thoroughly check the quality of particular glyphs, the current Unicode coverage and the accuracy of the metadata (authors, copyright, license, description, etc):

fontforge itself (obviously)
lcdtype's otfinfo
pango's pango-view
fontconfig's fc-query
fontaine
fontmatrix

So, feel free to help us out reviewing and improving the existing body of open fonts for the benefit of all. Thanks!

29 May 2009

2009-05-29T11:52:35+00:00

Inconsolata package updated

Raph, the new version of Inconsolata is now in Debian unstable. (Thanks again to bubulle for his help in getting it uploaded). Looking forward to Inconsolata's future goodness, like a lot of other people in the community :-)

Now I need to take care of packaging your other amazing open fonts...

New Interview with Mike Ruppert

2009-05-28T12:28:38+00:00

I’m happy to see this new interview with Mike Ruppert about his new book, “A Presidential Energy Policy.”

China is implementing his Presidential Point #1 - Double the national oil reserve storage, because we are post peak - and PetroChina is now the largest company in the world.

Runny technicolor

2009-05-27T22:55:37+00:00

Dans le cadre du festival “Imaginary Property”, OSP vous invite au Novale jeudi 28 mai 2009 à 19 h. Au programme : le jaune interdit et le rouge bientôt libre, un décodage de morceaux de vie montréalais au LGM 2009, une projection vers des formats inconnus et un aperçu de montage vidéo en mode texte [...]

Moblin 2.0

2009-05-27T09:58:01+00:00

Intel’s distribution of GNU/Linux, Moblin, is very nice:

25 May 2009

2009-05-25T02:36:28+00:00

I used to blog every day, now it seems I'm about at once a year. But there's reason to believe I might pick up the pace again...

PhD

I've been tuning out the world as much as I can, largely so that I can use whatever free time I have to finish up my thesis. The good news is, it's almost done, and I now have a reasonably coherent complete draft. Have a look.

I'll be presenting some of this work at CAD '09 in Reno on Jun 11.

Inconsolata

Lots of people like Inconsolata, and I've been getting quite a bit more email about it since that article came out.

I've been doing minor tweaks (such as making l and 1 more distinct), and now consider it pretty close to done. There are a batch of suggested changes people have sent as feedback. Some will be simple (adding endash and emdash glyphs) but others will take some more thinking.

Off the cliff we go

2009-05-23T23:05:22+00:00

The Oil Drum just posted an excellent up-to-date set of graphics on oil decline rates, and even at 3.4% this does not look good at all; that mean’s we’ll have half the liquid fuel we do today in 20 years time.

My gut feeling is that the rate of decline will accelerate, not float down as in the above graph, as it did in Cantarell:

Off the cliff we go.

Les enfants du transparent

2009-05-21T14:44:46+00:00

These days i’m in Malmö for The Art of the Overhead festival. For some years now, this art festival has done media archeology about the overhead projector. There was a workshop/space this week, there will be performances this weekend, there will be a psychedelic closing party next weekend, etc. We’re happy to see that the print for [...]

Seeking employment worldwide

2009-05-21T07:14:52+00:00

Hi everyone, After a long stint in closed doors contract-land, I’m now on the chase for a fulltime job. I’m looking anywhere in the world* *except for UAE and central Africa And i’d really appreciate you promoting the site below.

We all know the world needs more open source designers, so lets start by getting them paid

Conversion is costly

2009-05-20T00:14:03+00:00

Notes from print/pixel Last week, OSP attended the print/pixel conference in Rotterdam, a two day event gathering publishers, designers, marketeers and document engineers to look at the ever shifting relation between digital and paper publishing. For an integral report, see blog-posts by Jouke Kleerebezem and Arie Altena here: http://blog.wdka.nl/communication-in-a-digital-age. Our notes are fragmentary. Green = Femke Red = Lauren “Pixels [...]

interview at the airport

2009-05-19T17:31:44+00:00

on the way back from LGM Montréal - Trudeau airport. Sonore version will be coming soon…

seamful

2009-05-19T16:12:15+00:00

“Open Source doesn’t mean free access, nor open space or open air; it presumes a seamful approach to design as a response to the increasing reliance on technology and its accessibility” http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/research_2009.html…

UK Government Approves DRM

2009-05-19T15:02:44+00:00

A while ago I signed a petition to the UK Prime Minster’s office against DRM, and a response came back today. Not good and containing plenty of nonsense, sadly.

The petition was:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to investigate the legality and fairness of DRM, specifically SecuROM. With more and more consumers being effectively handcuffed by games producers using draconian methods of DRM, we require the government to protect our rights as consumers by investigating this issue. We maintain that “limited installs” and “online activation” are both misleading, immoral and discriminatory. We also maintain that our rights of resale are being infringed by said DRM methods.

The Government’s response:

The Government wants as many people as possible to enjoy all the benefits that broadband internet can bring. New technology has changed the way people want to use and access media content, in some cases faster than products and services commercially on offer have developed. But we are also clear that the benefits of the internet must include economic benefits for our creative industries and artists.

Of course DRM is about more than just preventing people doing things, it is also about enabling content and other companies to make their material available in more sophisticated ways, offering different deals at different price ranges for example. But it is also employed as a “policeman”, and it is particularly in those circumstances that the utilisation of DRM by rights holders can be controversial.

Generally speaking the Government considers that DRM remains a legitimate tool for industry to use so long, obviously, as its utilisation stays within the general legal framework. If consumers are resistant then there may well be commercial advantage to offering DRM-free goods, as is happening in the music industry – but as a tool it is reasonable to leave it as something to be deployed as appropriate.

Puerto Kookboek in progress

2009-05-19T14:05:03+00:00

Some things deserve documentation

2009-05-19T08:04:38+00:00

Sadly, I haven’t no time nor skill to write so much useful thing as documentation.

On the other hand, if most of the features are not obvious, at least they’re exposed in the user interface, thus "accessible" for the curious. Unfortunately, there is an area which is not at all exposed in the UI, the scripter. I won’t start document it right now! I just wanted to let you know the very first key (hm, 2 firsts!) of the Fontmatrix Python scripter.

print dir(Fontmatrix)

Palais Chalet Maastricht

2009-05-18T18:47:31+00:00

Our camarades are back. This time in The Netherlands. 29 mai 2009 Palais Chalet Live: Pierre Normal Bruno Cœurvert Dj’s Hugo Sanchez and the Palais Chalet Crew B32 artspice, Bourgognestraat 32, 6221 bz Maastricht And don’t miss Atka ’s superheroes in a collective exhibition from may 8 to 31 C’est notre muse a tous.

LGM’09 aftermath

2009-05-18T11:42:29+00:00

It’s been almost week since I’m back from LGM’09. Jet lag finally got me on my way back (8 hours between timezones), for the first time in my life. Am I growing older then?

I’m currently busy writing reports and sorting photos, but for now just few things:

lightning talks are great and should be used further, but in some cases we still need long talks
all talks in one room is good — everything is recorded
more time for BoFs is good, we need even more of that
BoFs should probably be recorded as well, at least audio
we need all the attention of local designers and content producers we can get — publish articles in local thematic magazines perhaps?
if we get this attention, we should better organize selling of books on using GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus and Blender (Blender movie DVDs too?) for little to no income, but publicity
we probably need some handouts for free software — something in the lines of LGM’07 newspaper, but smaller
we need a better academic track by all means

For the latter I think we should track scientific papers that relate to libre graphics tools.

Ay, and a small photo teaser for our LGM Flickr group

I want to once again thank all of our sponsors, especially our dear community. You are amazing!

LGM talk

2009-05-18T07:27:46+00:00

Incase you missed it, the Libre Graphics Meeting happened last week.
Thanks to the always awesome Dr. Kaveh Bazargan, many of the talks were recorded and put online for the enjoyment of others.

I actually wasn’t able to attend for the first time, so at 3:00am GMT+8, I recorded a talk to be played at the conference and answered questions via phone and IRC.
It was a great experience. Here’s the full video.

Elements & Principles of Design - Free Software from Andy Fitzsimon on Vimeo.

Update your NotCourier !

2009-05-17T16:23:57+00:00

A new version of the impolite NotCourierSans is available on the Open Font Library : NotCourierSans 1.1 As reminder, NotCourierSans is a re-interpretation of Nimbus Mono whose design began in Wroclaw at the occasion of the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008. For more detailed information explore the files included in the font package (FONTLOG.txt) or go through [...]

NotCourierSans

2009-05-17T14:34:47+00:00

NotCourierSans is a re-interpretation of Nimbus Mono whose design began in Wroclaw at the occasion of the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008.

We took Nimbus as the base of the design. We proceeded to remove the serifs with raw cuts. We did not soften the edges. We are not here to be polite.
See the file NotCourierSans-work.png included in the package.
-
Copyright (C) 2008 OSP (Ludivine Loiseau).
Copyright (URW)++, Copyright 1999 by (URW)++ Design & Development; Cyrillic glyphs added by Valek Filippov (C) 2001-2005 Cyrillic glyphs added by Valek Filippov (C) 2001-2005.

This Font Software is an open font and is released under the GPL v2 with font exception; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
> > >
This NotCourierSans 1.1 has been expanded by a work on cyrillic glyphs.
Paulo Silva aka nitrofurano, programmer and graphic designer in Porto
nitrofurano.linuxkafe.com removed serifs from cyrillic characters,
removed all kerning pairs and replaced the repeated glyphes with references (accented characters and alike).

I took the opportunity to clarify bonus glyphs position.
NotCourierSans 1.1 contains 2 ornamental glyphs encoded in the private use characters:
- in U+E000, the OSP frog mascot
- in U+E001, the 75 ligature added during an OSP workshop in Le 75, École Supérieure des Arts de l'Image www.le75.be on Wednesday 17 December.
These sugars are accessible through the Ornament Open Type features.