Re: Supporting the Unicode Project

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Dec 05 2003 - 08:23:32 EST

  • Next message: Edward H Trager: "Re: Supporting the Unicode Project"

    At 04:26 -0800 2003-12-05, Peter Kirk wrote:

    >>And then, it appears, you are suggesting that I should suspend my
    >>script encoding activities, deal with the (to me) very steep
    >>FontLab learning curve to get my SMP fonts working properly, then
    >>give them all away for free, and hope that there's some Germanicist
    >>out there sitting on a pile of money just waiting for that free
    >>Gothic font....
    >
    >I had assumed that Everson Typography, which offers "to make
    >available high-quality fonts" (from
    >http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/index.html), already had the
    >expertise required to make such fonts work properly.

    Sigh.

    I think I make nice outlines. People seem to like them. I don't find
    the new font tools to be very friendly, however. There are still many
    cross-platform problems, if you want to support older as well as
    newer systems. Then there's the horror of OT vs AAT and all sorts of
    scripting and command-line tools that must be great if you're a
    programmer. Perhaps you will forgive me for not investing my abundant
    spare time in dealing with such a high learning curve. I already have
    enough to do typesetting to pay the rent (fonts don't, especially if
    you give them away) in order to fund the time I need to spend on
    script proposals and standardization travel. Never mind a mortgage,
    given the housing market in the country I live in.

    In an ideal situation, I'd be working on Unicode full-time for the
    next eight years doing nothing but script proposals. The world
    doesn't seem to be able to offer me such employment, because as I've
    said, you can't sell alphabets to anyone. Do you think we enjoy
    holding out the begging bowl? We do it because we feel we must. Yet
    you've been saying: "Give us more for free." I'm sorry you can't feel
    more supportive. We need support. Unicode needs support. The
    unencoded scripts need support.

    -- 
    Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
    


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