Here is a specific one that hopefully would even be possible within our current budget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000
This is an amazing labour of love by one person, James Kass, and distributed as shareware for a meagre $5. As far as I know there is no font file that comes close in breadth of coverage, except perhaps for MsArialUnicode, which is a 25 Mb font file from Microsoft, and not free nor shareware :(
Erik Zachte
Erik Zachte wrote:
Here is a specific one that hopefully would even be possible within our current budget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000
This is an amazing labour of love by one person, James Kass, and distributed as shareware for a meagre $5. As far as I know there is no font file that comes close in breadth of coverage, except perhaps for MsArialUnicode, which is a 25 Mb font file from Microsoft, and not free nor shareware :(
Erik Zachte
Hoi, This is indeed an exquisite proposal .. Make the Fonts Free .. :) Thanks Erik for proposing this, GerardM
On 10/15/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Erik Zachte wrote:
Here is a specific one that hopefully would even be possible within our current budget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000
This is an amazing labour of love by one person, James Kass, and distributed as shareware for a meagre $5. As far as I know there is no font file that comes close in breadth of coverage, except perhaps for MsArialUnicode, which is a 25 Mb font file from Microsoft, and not free nor shareware :(
Erik Zachte
Hoi, This is indeed an exquisite proposal .. Make the Fonts Free .. :) Thanks Erik for proposing this, GerardM
That is an interesting proposal, but I don't quite understand: how are fonts copyrighted, and why is that a bad thing?
On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise enough money to ransom it just in en.
--Gwern
On 10/15/06, gwern branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
That is an interesting proposal, but I don't quite understand: how are fonts copyrighted, and why is that a bad thing?
On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise enough money to ransom it just in en.
or instead figure out how to support similar efforts which would not hold us for ransom:
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
:)
On 10/15/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/15/06, gwern branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
That is an interesting proposal, but I don't quite understand: how are fonts copyrighted, and why is that a bad thing?
On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise enough money to ransom it just in en.
or instead figure out how to support similar efforts which would not hold us for ransom:
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
:)
True, but time is money, as the saying goes. It may be fastest and best to take a proprietary project free rather than attempt to reinvent it; it worked well for the Blender project, I've heard.
--Gwern
Code2000 brings up a lot of error messages on my machine (OS X 10.4, intel).
On 10/15/06, gwern branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/15/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/15/06, gwern branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
That is an interesting proposal, but I don't quite understand: how are fonts copyrighted, and why is that a bad thing?
On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise enough money to ransom it just in en.
or instead figure out how to support similar efforts which would not hold us for ransom:
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
:)
True, but time is money, as the saying goes. It may be fastest and best to take a proprietary project free rather than attempt to reinvent it; it worked well for the Blender project, I've heard.
--Gwern _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise enough money to ransom it just in en.
Gregory Maxwell:
or instead figure out how to support similar efforts which would not hold us for ransom:
I don't feel the term 'ransom' is appropriate here. James Kass deserves appraisal for his amazing effort which borders on volunteerism anyway. He did not ask for a buyout, in fact he has nothing to do with my proposal yet.
I did not know of DejaVu and it looks promising as well, but not yet as far developed in number of languages supported.
I do admit Code2000 is less appropriate for Latin body text, but it would be very helpful for extending the language support of Wikimedia e.g. for EasyTimeline, and judging from the response of GerardM for WiktionaryZ, and many more applications outside Wikimedia.
Ben Yates:
Code2000 brings up a lot of error messages on my machine (OS X 10.4,
intel).
I use it on Windows and Pocket PC without problems.
Erik Zachte
On 10/15/06, Erik Zachte erikzachte@infodisiac.com wrote: [snip]
I don't feel the term 'ransom' is appropriate here. James Kass deserves appraisal for his amazing effort which borders on volunteerism anyway. He did not ask for a buyout, in fact he has nothing to do with my proposal yet.
I didn't mean it as a personal affront to the author.. As I explained more fully in my first reply (to your misdirected message on foundation-l) it's just a situation we need to avoid.
I'm all for us funding the creation of free works, but I think we need to tread carefully to make sure thats what we are doing rather than rewarding people who do not share and insulting our contributors in the process.
I did not know of DejaVu and it looks promising as well, but not yet as far developed in number of languages supported.
From the sept 3rd SPcom meeting:
Sep 03 17:05:44 <Erik_Zachte> one remark: I we could buy out CODE2000 we have nearly all languages covered Sep 03 17:05:59 <dbmag9> make a wikifont :) Sep 03 17:06:27 <NullC> dbmag9: please don't duplicate effort with http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Sep 03 17:06:44 <NullC> dbmag9: which seeks to make a quality unification unicode font. Sep 03 17:07:15 <dbmag9> NullC: i know - i was commenting that it would be nice if there were an open-source font of such scope, which could be used on wikimedia Sep 03 17:07:55 <NullC> dbmag9: there is, I just linked to it. :) It still has room for improvement.. so if anyone is interested in such a thing they should look there first. :) Sep 03 17:08:17 <dbmag9> NullC: sorry- didn't notice your link :p Sep 03 17:09:13 <NullC> dbmag9: So if you care about that subject.. please encourage others within wikimedia to use that font and submit bugreports... and perhaps someday we could standardize on it. Sep 03 17:09:35 <dbmag9> NullC: i will have a proper look tommorow - it looks very interesting so far
How are we to accomplish anything when our institutional memory is so poor that we forget things even without turnover? :)
I do admit Code2000 is less appropriate for Latin body text, but it would be very helpful for extending the language support of Wikimedia e.g. for EasyTimeline, and judging from the response of GerardM for WiktionaryZ, and many more applications outside Wikimedia.
We have at least one huge need for a standardized font *today* which I am aware of: Right now people creating SVGs have problems creating SVG's with text due to positioning errors for differing fonts (i.e. you draw a box and put text in it, but the text on the site is bigger and runs past the edge of the box).
Right now you will only get the same fonts in your editor as you do on Wikimedia if you're using inkscape in Fedora... With Fedora Core 6 the default font will be Dejavu, so even that will likely be broken.
I'd been planning to ask that dejavu be installed on our servers to at least have an easy answer for content authors (at least they could get consistent performance if they install and use the same font).. BUT rsvg has some text rendering bugs that make alignment differ from inkscape even using the same font, so I've been waiting until it's fixed to nag, so that I could show that with a font install and librsvg upgrade that we have a complete solution.
.. But for that application solid latin support is critical.
In my message to foundation-l I suggested we collaborate with the Dejavu folks ... perhaps we could bring code2000 and them together. I'm not sure. I'd be glad to help facilitate such a discussion, but I can't do it alone. I'm too ignorant of the internationalization issues. If someone with solid understanding of our charset needs, esp in RTL, asian, indic, and other less popular scripts would like to help me understand all the issues, I'd be glad to work with font authors to find a solution to all our needs.
Gregory:
I didn't mean it as a personal affront to the author.. As I explained more fully in my first reply (to your misdirected message on foundation-l) it's just a situation we need to avoid.
I'm all for us funding the creation of free works, but I think we need to tread carefully to make sure thats what we are doing rather than rewarding people who do not share and insulting our contributors in the process.
From the sept 3rd SPcom meeting: Sep 03 17:05:44 <Erik_Zachte> one remark: I we could buy out CODE2000 we have nearly all languages covered Sep 03 17:05:59 <dbmag9> make a wikifont :) Sep 03 17:06:27 <NullC> dbmag9: please don't duplicate effort with http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Gregory, I clearly forgot part of a response in a chat session. Must be my age. Still I feel it is not helpful to accuse mr Kass of insulting others by following a different business model.
Apart from that, you're clearly the expert. I rest my case. (And then forget that I did and propose this next month again) ;)
Erik Zachte
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