Transcription of the lightning talk: open font community: achievements and challenges. given at LGM09 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. ====================================== Alright... can you hear me? [French bit about upcoming transcription and translation] D'abord, peut-être, pour les francophones il y aura une transcription et une traduction en Français plus tard. So during this week we've been talking a lot about fonts and related things, but there are a few things we didn't cover that I thought I'd do a lightning talk about. I gave a talk in the Debian developer room at the last FOSDEM, [http://fosdem.org] so this is just a summary. [I wish the English language had more interesting characters picture]. Maybe you've seen this one. So there's the English language but there are about 7000 other languages that are also very interesting. [http://www.ethnologue.org/] [Debian font team]. Maybe you've seen this already but this is something that has been growing over the past year. Since the last LGM, more people have joined the Debian team, helping reviewing fonts, packaging them, interacting with upstream, etc. [Debian weekly font review]. And we have something that is useful to the wider open font community and others. We run a weekly review [http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/review/] detailing all the fonts we know about in the archive, we generate specimens, we extract all the metadata, we extract and compute the Unicode coverage, we run fontlint [Fontforge's analyser] to expose some of the problems with tables and so on. So if you want to find a place where there's already some analysis going on, then this is a start, of course the work that is going on for the Open Font Library, will go beyond what we currently have. [5 key criteria] So to get good open fonts, you have these 5 concepts: having them widely available, that they would be complete enough, that in the eyes of the people actually using the script it would reach sufficient level of quality and also handle the subtleties they have in that particular language, that if would be accessible: that people without deep pockets and a lot of education would also get access to these open fonts and writing systems. [picture: accessibility illustrations] Small is less, more is beautiful. Or something. It's great to have beautiful fonts but sometimes they're aren't even accessible. [OFL collaborative font model] This is why many in the community are recommending this model [http://scripts.sil.org/OFL] where we find the nexus between the needs of the designers who are actually produce the fonts and the values of Free Software like modification and redistribution. [unifont.org fontguide] If you're looking for a particular open font, there are various resources where you can go to like the unifont.org fontguide. [http://unifont.org/fontguide] [different types of fonts] Over the past few years there's been a number of new releases coming from different angles, coming from various places, different parts of the community: we had the Greek Font Society [http://www.greekfontsociety.gr/] releasing a lot of revivals, individuals committed to working on fonts, agencies like UNESCO [http://portal.unesco.org] and other foundations commissionning fonts, different type of fonts like monospace, pixel, maths and symbols fonts and so on. And we also had Ascender, a major foundry, being commissioned to do fonts like Droid or Liberation [http://www.ascendercorp.com/fonts/liberation/]. [the open font design toolkit] If you want to got one step beyond, and like we have done here for the open font design workshop, you can get more familiar with the toolkit, there is a metapackage you can install, it will pull in a number of useful things: give it a try. An increasing number of fonts are starting to get hosted under revision control. Dave showed you the Open Baskerville project [http://klepas.org/openbaskerville/] hosted on github but there are other places too. We've seen a lot of interesting progress on the main element of the toolkit: fontforge. [http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/]. But that's already been described. [fontforge themed] Also, the good thing for designers is that you can theme fontforge now: we've been doing that for a few of the designers here, and certainly from their perpective it certainly looks a lot nicer like that. [http://fontforge.wiki.sourceforge.net/themes] [best practises] Once you're familiar with the toolkit, then you want to start releasing: there are best practises, recommended things that you can start from: the FONTLOG is this font-design-oriented changelog with lots of interesting and useful information for people who would like to branch an existing font [http://www.openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Fontlog]. There's the "foo-open-font-sources-template" which describes the various formats that font sources and extended font sources can be stored in. [http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-fonts/foo-open-font-sources/#_foo-open-font-sources_] Then there is the whole thing about metadata which we discussed already. [ways you can help] So ways you could possibly help out: Well, I guess the obvious would be to try and see when there is a need that comes up if you can use an existing open font, advocating the model around you, you're all very clever hackers you could extend the toolkit, you could post the things that you do, you could use the VCS template [Version Control System foo-open-font-sources] as a reference for the upstreams. If you are close to a specific distribution, you might consider joining the fonts team, helping out also with the advocacy. See if some of these fonts can be usefully bundled in some of your applications. And then well, this is actually going on with the TextLayout meeting [http://freedesktop.org/wiki/TextLayout], but you could also study how some of the more complex needs can be implemented or you could reuse some of the existing features to make your libre design applications more multilingual. [libre/open font community] There is a planet, if you want to follow the various rss feeds of the people active in the open font community, you can add that to your reader. [http://planet.open-fonts.org] There's the stuff from the unifont.org website also, we have a campaign, [http://www.unifont.org/go_for_ofl/] with materials that you can use, if you need something like a formal letter of support to an upstream foundry or an individual upstream designer. The major community bodies have given their support to this campaign, so we have a official letter and so on, this is a resource that you can use. [the future...] And now our next steps are: getting the OpenFontLibrary fully launched. [http://openfontlibrary.org] Seeing what can happen obviously on the webfonts side of things. And then on the mobile devices: I think there's a definite need there too. We have lots of plans for open font design workshops [http://www.openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Workshops], so if you're interested come along or make them known at least with OSP's [ospublish.constantvzw.org] and Dave's work [http://understandinglimited.com/] and so on. And hopefully soon we're there! So that's it. Any, questions, comments?