Re: [native-lang] [Fwd: OFL revision available for review]

On 03/12/2006, at 9:50 PM, Charles Schulz wrote:

> Things look good from this side indeed. One day or another we should
> indeed think about having a default font for OOo... Gentium, released
> under the OFL and authored by the SIL (the org in question) would
> definitely welcomed...

There has been a lot of discussion recently among the free-software  
projects, especially the distros, about default fonts.

The IRC font meetings, in particular, brought font devs. and i18n  
reps. together to discuss problems for different languages. It was  
quite an experience to meet so many people you knew from different  
lists, in one place, and to deal with so many key issues in one  
discussion!

Some of the results of this work have been:

1. the draft recommendation for default Unicode fonts by script [1];  
note particularly the list of recommended fonts for each language

2. a summary of the meetings [2]

3. a collection of fontconfig fonts.conf files [3] — we hope to  
improve fontconfig's handling of default fonts on install

4. a lot of work in refining pan-Unicode fonts for languages  
previously inadequately represented. Dejavu [4], in particular, has  
made a consistent and strenuous effort to provide the best possible  
coverage for the maximum number of languages, and is consequently now  
the pan-Unicode free-software font I recommend even for Vietnamese,  
which offers a major challenge in general font design.

5. and this is the point I'd like to stress most here, that even for  
those of us who work in different projects, and are accustomed to  
bridging the gaps between those projects, this effort brought us into  
regular, closer contact and showed us what we can really do if we  
cooperate more.

This effort continues, but already it provides a strong base for  
default font selection by OOo.

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN

[1] http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts
[2] http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts_2fConfiguration
[3] http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts_2ffonts_2econf
[4] http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page