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