LWN: Comments on "Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)"

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

zenaan — Fri, 25 May 2018 23:50:34 +0000

> Maybe someone needs to pick up the idea of a remote font repository for big GUI apps like LibreOffice to drive the point home

How best could such a "pure floss" web/downloadable font service integrate with distros?

Git has established a baseline (albeit with protocol versioning only just coming down the pipeline) for “sane” content-addressed storage.

Identifying website images, fonts, Javascript bundles and other "relatively long-lived objects" with some form of content unique addressing/ Git-style IDs, would provide certain benefits such as

- reducing web traffic

- facilitating layered logic/ algorithms e.g. font versioning, metadata indexing

So often the web browser & website "is this content cached by the client" algorithms simply fail - badly effecting those of us with boondocks-class internet links who suffer such brain deadedness.

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

Sho — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 16:24:02 +0000

That's why it has a Font Manager that lets you group and load/unload fonts.

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

nix — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 16:11:56 +0000

Quite. It doesn't just need Qt 4, it needs QtWebKit, the Qt 4 version of which is horrifically insecure these days and should never be used for anything. Not their fault: they got trapped into using something that turned out to be rapidly obsoleted :(

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

ceplm — Mon, 12 Mar 2018 09:24:15 +0000

rm -f ~/.fonts/*gyre* && fc-cache

didn't do the trick?

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

antnisp — Mon, 12 Mar 2018 09:03:09 +0000

The plasma font installer fails on the simple task of uninstalling a font. I need at least half an hour to purge Tex Gyre Hero from my system when texlive brings it in.

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

pabs — Sat, 10 Mar 2018 03:06:44 +0000

Fontmatrix was already removed from Debian.

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

mrdocs — Sat, 10 Mar 2018 02:10:57 +0000

It is on life support.

What it really needs is a Qt5 port and finishing the functionality.

I've kept it packaged for openSUSE and I can't imagine it has been dropped from many distros.

When Pierre who started Fontmatrix, he really was aiming a professional grade type manager.

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

LightDot — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 19:52:52 +0000

Fontmatrix works, doesn't it? Showing some recent signs of life too...

https://github.com/fontmatrix/fontmatrix

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

bokr — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 00:32:03 +0000

Why no menition of harfbuzz?
(see LWN article not so long ago):
https://lwn.net/Articles/741722/

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

nix — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 18:36:24 +0000

Fontfinder is nice, though not quite a replacement for the late lamented FontMatrix... but it's specific to one provider and has no support for things like displaying with particular OTF tags etc etc, so it's got a long way to go before it's anything like what Nathan's asking for.

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

yosch — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 14:24:52 +0000

Surely, recent improvements in the font widgets in LibreOffice and GNOME are steps in the right direction:
https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2018/02/18/imp... and https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2018/01/03/more-fun-with-...

Typecatcher (https://github.com/andrewsomething/typecatcher) is a simple GUI attempt at using the API of such an open (web)font service.

Maybe someone needs to pick up the idea of a remote font repository for big GUI apps like LibreOffice to drive the point home:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/Fo....

My guess is that, as more upstream open font projects starting publish their full sources and complete reproducible buildpaths (thankfully it gets easier and easier to do achieve that) along with having some sort of web presence, things like better documentation, clear specimens and useful metadata should get better.

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

nim-nim — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 14:01:47 +0000

Nathan is asking for a lot more than that. He want something able to manage the large sets of free and open fonts we have now (thanks to years of progress) because people in design activities do use a lot more fonts than the typical generic desktop system.

Anyway you look at it, unless you're able to change the opentype specification to include a lot more information in its metadata, that means a new distribution container (not simply zipfile).

(I'll ignore the 'but the original metadata is wrong and incomplete case'. The point of free and open fonts is to be able to fix and extend the font files when needed)

Exploring free and open web fonts (opensource.com)

Sho — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 12:23:48 +0000

What a strangely under-researched article for Nathan Willis. KDE has had a Font Installer right in the System Settings app for ages; you can just hand it that .zip file, and it will take care of installing the fonts and showing them to you. It also has a basic font manager.