[Freefont-announce] Some news on Free UCS outline fonts project

[Primoz PETERLIN]

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Dear collegues,

I believe you deserve to hear some news on the state of Free UCS outline
fonts project. :)

1) We are in the final stages of negotiations about being accepted as a
part of GNU project. The GNU project evaluators have surveyed the project
and their report was mostly positive, but they have noted the missing
installation notes and installation scripts. RMS has issued his
conditional blessing, provided that we remedy these deficiences, which I
plan to do soon.

2) Aside from these, one principal deficiency was the lack of Truetype
hints. Over the past few days, I was in contact with Rogier van Dalen, the
author of several Truetype utilities
<http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~slam/fonts/>, which now mostly compile on Linux
as well. Among them is a tticomp, which can be used for adding Truetype
hints to font files. A lot of work remains to be done in this area,
though. Any volunteers would be helpful, either for manual hinting work or
for devising algorithms for automatic hinting that would speed the
process.

3) A couple of months ago, Werner Lemberg started to complain that each
time he updates the fonts from the CVS repository, the whole load is
dumped on him instead of differences only. He suggested that this might be
related to the fact that CVS/Entries file contains dummy timestamps. It
took me a while to realize that CVS obviously treats version numbers 0.*
differently from the others. Therefore I have resubmitted all the SFD
files into the 1.* tree, which seems to have solved the problem. So the
next time you will update your archive will hopefully be the last time you
will have to download the whole archive.

4) I am in contact with several other free fonts projects that are
sprouting, among them Culmus <http://culmus.sourceforge.net/>, Free Bangla
Fonts <http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/freebangfont>, Akruti Indian
Language Fonts <http://www.gnu.org.in/software/software.html#akryti> etc.

With kind regards, and lots of good wishes for the holiday season,

Primoz Peterlin

- --
Primož Peterlin,   Inštitut za biofiziko, Med. fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani
Lipičeva 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija.  address@hidden
Tel +386-1-5437632, fax +386-1-4315127,  http://biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si/~peterlin/
F8021D69 OpenPGP fingerprint: CB 6F F1 EE D9 67 E0 2F  0B 59 AF 0D 79 56 19 0F
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