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.