I tested Legendum and Garogier

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le dimanche 20 juillet 2008 à 20:13 +0300, Vasile Gaburici a écrit :

> Including them in Fedora would be a bad idea. They lack plenty of
> accented glyphs.

News at 11, fonts with good Unicode coverage and a correct license are
very few.

> Since the fonts are unmaintained, they aren't likely
> to be fixed upstream.

But their license means anyone, not just the author can work on them (ie
romanians can fix romanian glyphs for a start). Which means publishing
them can incite people to work on them instead of wasting their time
with gratis non-modifiable fonts.

If the free/open font scene was striving Red Hat needn't have shelled a
lot of money to a closed foundry like Ascender. Or the GNOME Foundation
needn't have done the same with Bitstream for Vera. Experience shows it
is very possible to extend a font with little coverage to more than
decent one but it requires making a lot of noise around unfinished font
cores with correct licensing to get someone interested. And you don't
get there via traditionnal ivory tower isolated font designer workflow.

Teams was released in 2000 by TopTeam. It took 8 years before someone
picked it up and started updating it (Edrip). Have Debian (and other
distributions, sadly Fedora not included) wasted their time by
publishing Teams for 8 years in its poor state? If they hadn't I
strongly suspect Edrip would not have happened.

We're seeding our future. Those things take time, a lot of time. And the
future will happen faster if people stop putting their heads in the
sand, wasting time on proprietary fonts or font tools, and get to work.

During this year's LGM a concerted effort created a new nicely licensed
font from an old fossilizing one in a few days. Just a few years ago
this would have been complete science fiction.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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