Specs, hi-tech, photography, grumbling
As promised before I start a series of postings about Libre Graphics Meeting and how it affects development of open source software.
Fontmatrix, as Peter Linnell says, is THE application for Scribus users: it is a new yet versatile font management application. This was the first application in C++ that Pierre Marchand, its principal developer, ever wrote, and it’s amazing how far it’s gone so far.
Continue reading ‘LGM’08, Fontmatrix’
We ask our community to support Libre Graphics Meeting conference again. Last year we managed to collect 12K in few weeks and we put it to a really good use. I’ll be talking about LGM2008 in further blog postings about past, present and future of LGM.
Fontmatrix 0.5.0 is somewhat delayed, but this is because of some internal work and, of course, quite a number of new features. Pierre Marchand, who is lead developer of FontMatrix, has just recorded a video that explains new interface to search for fonts by their PANOSE metadata. This is a just two or three days old code, so changes may follow.
Some of you, people, dislike Novell for Mono. Next step would be boycotting any open source application that can make a good use of OpenType fonts. Because the OTF technology, you know, also comes from Microsoft. What’s “worse” is that Adobe participated too 
Yes, I’m in a very linuxhaters mood today.
What is it? Cooking classes?
Nooo! This is actually a Print Party by Open Source Publishing that is ongoing right now in a Wroclaw pub, just two days before Libre Graphics Meeting 2008. If you are around, don’t miss out tomorrow’s type design workshop.
Lately there has been some buzz around Xara again. People are pretty disappointed because of having not all of Xtreme source code available despite of promises. But people, c’mon — this company did a huge step forward. They have never had dealed with open source before and now they are part of an even larger company that also has never had dealed with open surce before. Showing them how unforgiving and agressive open source community can be is hardly something we really want in the end. Just treat people the way you want them to treat you.
On a different matter: XSane is rocking again with support for color management. Looks like we are having fully color managed and working environment for prepress Really Soon.
And yet another thing. We are finally running a logo contest for Open Font Library. If you feel like you want to contribute, don’t hesitate to do so 
Recently a friend of mine gave me a whole CD of scanned public domain fonts waiting to be digitized. The usual way I did it before is importing scans of every glyph into Inkscape, then drawing Bezier curves over those bitmaps and saving the result as plain SVG files, then importing them into a FontForge project (sadly, I’m not keen of FF’s native Bezier curve tool).
The problem was that each file is a ca. 7300×12400 px large, 8bit, greyscale PNG, varying from 8 to 13 Mbytes. Both GIMP, Krita and display of ImageMagick practically freezed my X session, trying to load it (I do have 2 gigs of tile cache set in GIMP). No image viewer I had around could display any of them without eating all of available resources. But I was still going to find some tool that would let me view and visually blast each scan into separate glyphs.
The solution came as nip2 — a front-end to excellent VIPS — a “free image processing system half-way between Photoshop and Excel”. Not only it loaded each file in a couple of seconds, but let me pan around and zoom and crop without any painful waiting, not even speaking about killing X.
I wonder if the related code from VIPS could be massively reused in other graphics applications, so that noone would ever have the experience that I had.
I was lucky to attend a seminar on fonts organized by Paratype last Saturday. These guys are doing amazing proprietary stuff
It was pretty interesting to hear about their licensing policy (since I didn’t know much about it really) and their work. Before this event I used to think that fonts are a work of a single person, more or less supported by someone else after the death of original designer. As it turns out, two or more people can participate at creating or localizing a font, which is pretty similar to open source fonts design made by SIL and Linux Libertine guys.
Careful reading of Open Font License is still on my ToDo.
Jon Philips has created another SVN repo for OpenFontLibrary, the one we should have started with: openfontlibrary_fonts.
It has nothing inside yet, but as soon as I come around fd.o sitewranglers to have my password issue fixed, I will start uploading some stuff I’ve been working on for a while
Anonymous access:
svn co svn://anonsvn.freedesktop.org/svn/openfontlibrary/openfontlibrary_fonts/trunk ofl_fonts
Developer access:
svn co svn+ssh://svn.freedesktop.org/svn/openfontlibrary/openfontlibrary_fonts/trunk ofl_fonts
If you want to contribute, go ahead and subscribe to the mailing list to tell us about fonts you are working on.
Now that Scribus supports inserting 7 types of typographic spaces directly from menu, you might find useful a tutorial by Pierre-Luc Auclair “Adding typographic spaces to fonts with FontForge”. Read it here.