On 10/15/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte(a)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.