Re: Romanized Cyrillic bibliographic data--viable fonts?)

From: Edward H Trager (ehtrager@umich.edu)
Date: Fri Aug 30 2002 - 15:38:48 EDT


On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Michael Everson wrote:

> At 11:00 -0400 2002-08-30, Edward H Trager wrote:
>
> >The solution is to use collaborative Open Source development methodologies
> >to produce one or more high-quality, operating system and vendor-neutral
> >TTF and OpenType unicode fonts. Resulting fonts would be copyrighted and
> >released under a well-known Open Source license like the General Public
> >License (GPL, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) or a BSD-style
> >license.
>
> And who pays the poor font designer for his work?

Exactly! That's why I chose to use the words "funded collaborative
project" ... I am actually in the process of formulating ideas on exactly
*how* to define such a project in a way that would appeal to both
contributors as well as potential funding entities.

Also, when I wrote, "Just thinking about maintaining consistency in style
and quality with multiple contributors will certainly lead some readers,
of this list to conclude that it's not possible" ... I was also thinking
about the issue of how do you get the highly qualified designers
interested in such a project?

What I do know is that in the field of software design, the really good,
really important Open Source software projects have been very successful
at attracting some of the best programmers out there. Obviously, those
programmers are already employed at companies where they have good
salaries, and apparently enough spare time to contribute to Open Source
too. Their contribution to Open Source is usually in their self-interest:
They themselves are able to solve problems using the software that they
are contributing their engineering expertise too. I don't see any
obstacles preventing unicoders from using the same model to create some
standard, open unicode fonts if it will help solve everybody's "missing
glyphs" problem.



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