Re: Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting September 10 2002

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

Wow, I hope that this works out, one way or another. If everything else
fails, we can have a fundraiser - I'd gladly contribute $50 if I knew
that all my problems with printing Cyrillic are solved "out of the box".
Of course, having Sun, Red Hat, Mandrake, and UnitedLinux contribute
would be more viable. 

BTW: are you aware of STIX project? This is a project of several
scientific societies (Amer. Math. Soc., IEEE, Amer. Phys. Soc., Amer.
Chem. Soc., Elsevier publishers) to create "comprehensive set of fonts
that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from
manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and
print formats. Toward this purpose, the STIX fonts will be made
available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers,
software developers, scientists, students, and the general public" (from
http://www.stixfonts.org/). Maybe we can have somehow coordinate with
them. (I have contacts in Amer. Math.Soc. if you need it). 

Sasha 


On Fri, 2002-09-13 at 10:55, Jim Gettys hp com wrote:
> Roughly, we've been trying to get as much as we can given the financial
> constraints (almost no money).
> 
> Solving the open source "out of the box" problem is something we must
> do to likely get open source desktops to serious volume.  Our presumption is
> that people frequently already own a copy of other fonts that are useful to them, and that third party software generally provides good fonts with it.
> We feel the most urgent problem to sove is having some presentable fonts that can be truly freely redistributed, so that applications can depend on their
> existance, and Gnome (and all other open source software) look good out
> of the box.
> 
> Once we break into the general market, I expect the financial constraints we face today will become less serious; right now, we have little
> credibility with people with deep pockets, something I hope will change
> next year as current technologies start serious deployment.  But today,
> your first hassle is installation and configuration of *any* fonts at all,
> which has left us at a very serious disadvantage relative to Windows and
> Mac.  So this is a chicken and egg problem that we must solve to go further.
> 
> One of the major font vendors wanted of order $400K US for a really
> nice set of fonts: I don't know where we can get that kind of money at the
> moment;  there is still too much skepticism in most companies that Linux can
> make it on the desktop to venture that kind of money during economic recession
> times.  So that option doesn't seem viable right now (it might be once things
> start rolling seriously).
> 
> We are making serious progress with another vendor, though there have been some rendering issues with the proposed font set (recently resolved), and I18N
> coverage issues, for which they will be providing some additional fonts with
> wider coverage (this is all presuming the negotiations come to a successful
> conclusiong, hopefully quite soon), since Pango/Fontconfig can "do the right
> thing" to use multiple fonts at once.  This is not ideal, but would end up with
> fonts that are very much better than anything we have available now, with
> decent I18N coverage.
> 
> Fonts for Chinese, Japanese, etc, are a different kettle of fish and appear
> completely out of reach.
> 
> Another option, that would cost of order $75K-$100K, would be to get Chuck
> Bigelow's Luxi family hinted (it is already freely redistributable
> as part of XFree86, but it was developed as Type1 and has never been
> hinted well for TrueType, which is why when you use Luxi on your screen
> that does not look very nice), but this would also require serious fundraising;
> it is probably the option we'll might have to go for if negotiations fall
> through.
> 
> So, in short, our priority list has been (in this order):
>  0) freely redistributable fonts
>  1) high quality fonts
>  2) I18N coverage
>  3) monospace, sans and serif fonts are needed.
> 
> Note that I18N is on the list as very important when we've been talking to
> vendors.
> 
> Nothing else really makes the list particularly (though we do worry about
> some nits like distingushing 0O and 1l in the monospace face).
> 
> I hope to be able to say more soon.
>                                           - Jim
> 
> -
> Jim Gettys
> Cambridge Research Laboratory
> HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
> Jim Gettys hp com
>