[Desktop_architects] LinuxTag 2006 -- What visitors/users told about Linux on the Desktop

[Bryce Harrington]

On Sun, May 07, 2006 at 02:29:53PM +0200, Egbert Eich wrote:
> Till Kamppeter writes:
>  > - Unique fonts on all distros: A core set of fonts should be absolutely
>  >   identical on all distros. These fonts should be default
> 
> This would require a decent set of open sourced fonts available that 
> cover the character sets that are required in the locales where linux
> matters.
> We've discussed this often at X.Org (as we are one source of fonts):
> - Few open source tools exist to help with font design.

>From what I've seen, actually there are some open source font tools out
there with good guts, but they could use some UI design attention.  I'm
curious how hard it would be to take one of these tools and put a nicer
front end on it.  Then this issue could go away.

Even without this, the tools are quite usable.  We'd talked about
possibly incorporating font design features into inkscape, but after
reviewing the existing tools, felt that they were good enough as is.

> - Good font desgin is a hard job requiring a lot of experience.
>   (Probably not a job for a group of people from the community to
>   pick up)

Sure, but there's many hard tasks requiring experience that the open
source community actually has excelled at.  Many of these kinds of tasks
don't really need a group of people, but rather one or two people with
an obsessive passion in the subject, the right tools, and an audience to
encourage them.

> - There is almost no way around taking some money and 'by' fonts
>   to put them under a suitable license.

I don't know; that could certainly work, but I wouldn't say it's the
only way.  I think with a good community support, we could "grow" expert
font designers, just as we've grown excellent iconographers,
translators, usability experts, and so on.  My experience so far working
with font designers (e.g. Benji Park http://ocal.bensuz.com/) has been
positive, and with our encouragement and help increasing the visibility
of their efforts, we could solve this issue much more fully.

http://www.openfontlibrary.org/

Bryce