So, I was googling for something today and stumbled upon a 3 weeks old (that is, nobody cares about it anymore) interview with Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.

As a person currently employed in marketing, I certainly know how important it is to focus on good things that your company does when you are spreading PR with a big shovel. It’s more or less OK to make controversial statements, if you can keep the game on, but telling outright lies? No, I don’t think so.

Here is an interesting excerpt:

“The fact that GNOME and other projects now value design,” Silber stops, perhaps to reconsider the boldness of what she is about to say. “If you go back three years ago nobody was talking about design, nobody was doing user research. It is actually something we have had great influence on, by calling attention to it and putting our efforts there. I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects. That is something that we feel good about; you can attribute that to our leadership in that area, even if it’s not our code and our design.”

Can you see what’s wrong with it? Let’s chop it up into smaller bits.

The fact that GNOME and other projects now value design

*sigh* She just had to say that, yeah?

If you go back three years ago nobody was talking about design

Dear Ms. Silber, I suggest you go five years ago, or even more, and discover Tango project. In 2007 I did an interview with them for GNOME Journal. It is real, and there is proof.

Probably you would  also like to find out that Ascender Corp. was comissioned by Redhat to create Liberation fonts and delivered them in early 2007. That  was just how many years prior to Ubuntu font family?

nobody was doing user research

How about Sun having done a usability study of GNOME in 2001, several years before Canonical was even conceived?

I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects.

That, at least, is true.

That is something that we feel good about; you can attribute that to our leadership in that area,

And this is what it was all about: leadership.

I don’t believe that anyone who’s been with the company since 2004 could possibly not know all of that. So what was that? Canonical claims to have invented design and user research in free software? When did they start acting in the worst traditions of Microsoft et al.?

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.

I don’t think that it would be an exaggeration to call Pierre the next Franz Schmid. Just like Franz studied DTP by reading PDF specifications and created Scribus, Pierre studied OpenType and Unicode reading respective specs and created Fontmatrix. His attitude to variety of scripts is crystal clear: when you go to “Sample text” tab and click “Display options”, you see that the group of controls that defines inline and block progression, is called “World is wide”.

As he states in his unique humorous way, “People ask me about Devanagari support, but I don’t know Devanagari. I read Unicode specs, I fall asleep”

And this is what Pierre says about LGM:

“As you know, Fm is mostly my thing, so i would note at first what it did for myself. LGM has been the place where I’ve met LG people for the first time, from Scribus team to OSP gang and so much other type enthusiasts. It is important to compensate all this time spent alone developing a piece of
software with friendly relationships. It keeps up the motivation to go on. Secondly, Fm was rather unknown at that moment and it has been fantastic (well, it could have been even better with more sleeping time ) to present it to an assembly of type hackers. Time was a bit short to carefully harvest all ideas which have been exposed, but some have found their way in Fm.”

Since then Fontmatrix has undergone a lot of changes in SVN repository. First, version 0.4 was released in June, then the version 0.5 was silently released as an SVN branch, because Pierre didn’t consider it good enough for the public, and the work goes on.

The list of changes since 0.4.2 currently includes extracting fonts from PDF for issue investigation purposes, editing Panose data (changes are stored only in the database), HEX view of TrueType/OpenType tables, new classification (Panose) widget for fonts search which is, again, due to major redesign, new templates system, glyph comparison view (screenshot below), new help system shaping up and more.

But notably the next version will also feature Python scripting which will eventually open the door to all kinds of extensions. For instance, using FontTools.

So if you care about seing Fontmatrix progress further, please consider supporting the conference

Yes, I’m in a very linuxhaters mood today.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.