Adobe ventures into open fonts [LWN.net]

Adobe ventures into open fonts

Posted Aug 8, 2012 6:46 UTC (Wed) by alonz (subscriber, #815)
Parent article: Adobe ventures into open fonts

I wonder how long Adobe will keep this alive—it's a promising start, but the font won't support international character sets anytime soon; and it looks like comparable projects (e.g. the Ubuntu font) never stay alive under corporate sponsorship long enough to achieve their goals.

(Log in to post comments)

Adobe ventures into open fonts

Posted Aug 9, 2012 11:43 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Was it ever alive? It is missing some strokes I can consider vital, such as in the lower-case 't'.

Adobe ventures into open fonts

Posted Aug 9, 2012 13:10 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (editor, #43041) [Link]

My understanding is that Dalton Maag has a "perpetual" contract to support and extend the Ubuntu font family. Exactly what the terms of that contract are are not public, of course. But you can visit the project page and clearly see its ongoing development.

In any case, once the font is released under OFL, it doesn't matter so much if Adobe stops contributing to it, because others can. DejaVu and the Croscore fonts (which we discussed in June: https://lwn.net/Articles/502371/ ) are demonstrations of that. Which is not to say that it's a good thing when contributors (corporate or otherwise) drop out; just that "achieving their goals" is not an opportunity that vanishes if someone stops working.

Nate

Adobe ventures into open fonts

Posted Aug 13, 2012 21:19 UTC (Mon) by alonz (subscriber, #815) [Link]

(I know, replying a week late isn't conductive to discussion...)

I did look at the project page; and what I saw was a list of milestones with dates in the deep past, with no progress in months. In fact, the latest release was on September 2011 – and it was supposed to be just the middle of the first stage of development (a second stage hadn't even started).

To me, this project certainly seems to be pushing up the daisies.

Adobe ventures into open fonts

Posted Aug 14, 2012 15:41 UTC (Tue) by n8willis (editor, #43041) [Link]

But Ubuntu is not Dalton Maag's sole client. If you follow the foundry's blog, for most of this year they've been doing a major project for Nokia and one for the 2016 Olympics.

Since the monospace was released and the initial script set was done, adding a new language or a new face/weight is likely to be something that they'd only tackle on a periodic basis between other projects. I have no idea if there are additional scripts that the company has agreed to take on, or if that's something that they revisit with Canonical. The issue tracker on Launchpad was largely the purview of Paul Sladen, and I believe he's off doing other things. Neither of things equates to the font "pushing up daisies"; I would hardly think things like continually adding extra weights just to be doing something would be worth the time.

So you may not see a whole new face added again until someone comes up with a different use case (like one cut for extra-small point sizes, if Canonical decides the existing one doesn't jive with mobile devices or whatever). But who knows; DM could surprise us with a full "Extended" face next week.

Nate