Fuentes libres en Madrid, España

Plenty of libre/open font-related sessions on the program at this year's LGM in Madrid...

New open fonts shipping with LibreOffice 4.0

Interesting to see that LibreOffice 4.0 increases the number of open fonts bundled by default: the release notes mention - among quite a few other nifty new features - that Open Sans by Ascender, PT Serif by ParaType, Source Code Pro and Source Sans Pro by Adobe join the existing Dejavu, Liberation, Gentium and Libertine font families that LibreOffice users can enjoy without having to go through any installation steps.

More quality entries in your font menu :-D

Of course this font repository integration idea sounds very good too!

Some promising aspects of Source Sans Pro, Adobe's recently published open font

So, it looks like Adobe's recent decision to release Source Sans Pro as an open font under the OFL has been well-received in various parts of the interwebs.

I'd like to add big congrats to Paul D Hunt, Ken Lunde, Robert Slimbach, Miguel Souza and Ernie March (and as few others at Adobe I imagine) as well for going open with all this work. May they reap many benefits for this move.

Besides the design quality and the unusual fact that Adobe-affiliated designers and font engineers are directly involved, I think there are some very promising aspects worth pointing out: Source Sans comes with an AFDKO buildpath and the corresponding full set of source files, various smart behaviours (via OpenType), initial focus on supporting languages using extended latin (like Vietnamese and Navajo) and tentative plans for newer writings systems in the published roadmap in which they invite outside participation to the project.

Seeing the authors interact and reply to community input directly in the blog discussion thread is quite promising too: making adjustments to the zip structure of the release, explaining how people can make their own branch if they want, promising more technical documentation on the buildpath, exploring the use of a DVCS and possibly fontforge, etc. IMHO it shows a great willingness to think and act beyond a simple code drop by looking at ongoing maintainership. Many miles ahead compared to somewhat similar open font releases by corporations I've been able to observe previously. Well-done.

I'm looking forward to the Monospace version in the pipeline...

Maybe Adobe will even consider making the AFDKO toolkit more open in the future? There were queries about releasing AFDKO more openly earlier (the python scripts themselves are already under the MIT license)...

Updating FontForge's localization into French

A few weeks ago, as part of a booksprint on libre/open fonts, some of us started to update the French translation of FontForge, the libre software font editor. Fontforge uses GNU gettext and the UI translation documentation outlines the methodology for getting the messages updated and tested.

This was driven by the need to make the terminology coherent and to illustrate various chapters with screenshots in French for Fontes Libres a book written in French on libre/open fonts and related topics. This book effort has been made possible thanks to FLOSS Manuals fr and the financial support of Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.

We built upon the previous translation work done by Pierre Hanser and Yannis Haralambous. Interestingly enough, much of the needed translation of po/fr.po was done and tested using gobby in a hotel lobby over a wireless network. There are much better workflows out there but this ad-hoc method was helpful.

There is still a lot left to translate but things are on their way and I hope this can get finished soon and submitted for inclusion upstream.

One more way the wider community will benefit from this booksprint !

FLOSS Manuals booksprint on libre/open fonts

Thanks to the efforts of the FLOSS Manuals francophone team: namely Elisa Godoy de Castro Guerra and Cédric Gémy, a bunch of us with some knowledge and experience of libre/open fonts are getting together for a few days to do a booksprint on the topic (with the necessary funding provided by OIF).

It should be really interesting to use agile methods to work together on a book to explore this very rich and diverse subject.

A great opportunity for me to discuss and write up in a more structured way thoughts and corresponding best practises on the key issues from the various talks given at FLOSS conferences these past few years. They have been sitting idle on my hard drive for too long...

The resulting book written in French will be released under a libre license and join a growing collection of books (manuals) in various languages such as: Français, English, Suomi, Nederlands and فارسی Farsi .

Looking forward to meeting the other authors and to the whole collaborative writing experience!