Re: Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting September 10 2002

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 21:42, Alexander Kirillov wrote:

> Can someone clarify what exactly we are trying to do? Order a font from
> the vendor to be included in GNOME under GPL? *One* font?

The goal is to end up with a set of fonts -- at the very least,
a text font in the first instance -- that we can guarantee being
available on pretty much all platforms.  Said fonts to be high quality,
hinted, and have the best glyph coverage possible,given financial
constraints.  E.g., WGL4.

> In what ways will be it better than existing URW Type 1 fonts?
Supporting more languages/scripts, and better hinting most likely.
I'd prefer to spend money on improving the Type 1 renderer
in FreeType than buying rights to fonts, unless the fonts have a much
better character set.

Note that fonts are protected IPR, so we can't use pirated ones.

Hope this helps - my own involvemnt in this effort has been limited,
of late, although I did spend a few minutes talking about a possible
fonts.gnu.org portal (not sure this is a goodidea) with RMS and others
at OSCON in San Diego.  part of the deal involves -- or should
involve -- a "get more fonts" button on the gnome and kde font choosers.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001