Re: Funding FontForge

On 19 April 2016 at 03:26, Frank Trampe <[email protected]> wrote:

> This was indeed a result of my queries. But even Dave still uses
> FontForge, as I remarked to much snickering during my LGM talk this year.
> And Dave is far from alone in this regard.
>

I'm not saying that we should not use FontForge.

I'm saying that we should not develop it much, because that development
effort should be put into another project. Currently I think this is
TruFont.

I think making releases from time to time - perhaps every 6 months - is a
good idea, because naturally users who are C developers contribute patches.


> By my estimates, there are about 2,000 active typeface designers in the
> world, and the FontForge release from a few weeks ago recently hit 10,000
> downloads, not counting Debian and Ubuntu packages. This means that
> FontForge has roughly 500% market share. It would be devastating to the
> typeface design community to lose access to a tool that 5 in 1 of its
> members use regularly.
>

395%, because almost none of the 2,000 active typeface designers in the
world use FontForge.


> The death of FontForge is not an end unto itself and does not magically
> create a replacement software package. We're probably five years from
> having an end-to-end replacement, and people still need to design, to
> maintain, and to convert typefaces during that time.
>

Sure, and they should use FF and put up with it - as I do.


> I'm not thrilled about carrying most of the burden, but FontForge must
> continue to support its user community, and I hope that its user community
> will consider ways to support FontForge during that time.
>

If you want to raise funds and advance FontForge, that's great! But I'm not
going to, beyond getting a release done every once in a while :)

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