IRC Meeting (#freedesktop Freenode) tomorrow Friday, 14Jul06, 20:00 GMT: Fonts; choosing fonts; fonts.conf; fontconfig

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

Dear All,

I would like to announce an IRC meeting that will take place tomorrow
Friday, 14th July 2006, at 20:00 GMT, at #freedesktop on Freenode (IRC).

To find the exact local time for your country, see
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2006&month=7&day=14&hour=20&min=0&sec=0
For example, if you are in Paris, the meeting is on Friday at 10:00pm.
If you are in Asia/Australia, it will probably be inconvenient. Please
mail me about it. If there is enough interest (>5 e-mails), we can
arrange a repeat meeting. Tell me what time is suitable for you. This is
particularly important for Indic/CJK/etc font issues.

The expected duration is 1 hour. Based on interest and support, we may
arrange extra sessions. 

The agenda includes:
1. discussion on basic issues on fonts; font licenses; 
2. building a list of 'desirable' FLOSS fonts for each language/script;
tell us your preference; promote your preference
3. build an 'optimal' fonts.conf file (+ suggest
snippets for fonts.d/); LSB common font repository
4. discuss the proposed fontconfig patch for granular font selection,
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2006-June/002332.html
5. discuss on writing a patch for fontconfig to disregard glyphs from
fonts in a very low level (as if the font did not have those glyphs in
the first place)

The webpage of this discussion is at
http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts_2fConfiguration

The discussion (irclog) will be saved at the above URL as well.

Extra reading
1. Call to test the DejaVu fonts
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts/DejavuFeedbackCall
2. The Open Font License (OFL) by SIL International
http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
3. Fonts page on the Freedesktop Wiki
http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts
4. OpenFonts page on the Ubuntu Wiki
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OpenFonts
5. Fonts management
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FontManagement
6. Font issues across distros
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts/FontMusings
7. Enhancing pango/fontconfig to help solve font issues
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=18518811
8. re: fontconfig support to exclude glyphs from fonts
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2006-June/002332.html
9. Open source casts new mold for type design (recent font article)
http://news.com.com/2102-7344_3-6092398.html?tag=st.util.print

A similar IRC meeting took place last week, on input methods and
multilingual writing support in Xorg; the discussion is available at
http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/KeyboardInputDiscussion

Please forward this announcement where you feel appropriate.

Hope to see you tomorrow,
Simos