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Projects Google Fonts ought to fund in 2023?
Dave Crossland
Posts: 1,269
in Job Postings
I'm the font development programme manager, and I'm putting together a 2023 plan for programmes to fund - typeface projects, code/tool projects to support font development, event sponsorships, etc.
I want to make a more public call for project proposals generally, so starting with a thread here first - although I guess most people will want to get in touch with my privately.
Type Drawers private message, dm on Twitter, email to [email protected], etc all go to the same inbox
I want to make a more public call for project proposals generally, so starting with a thread here first - although I guess most people will want to get in touch with my privately.
Type Drawers private message, dm on Twitter, email to [email protected], etc all go to the same inbox
1
Comments
Buy the entire Berthold library from its current “owner,” pay back royalties to its surviving designers, and make it open source.
I’d be happy to provide Google with a project proposal and pricing for a fully implemented phonetic notation extension to Castoro (minimum IPA, but also options for Americanist and Uralicist).
Here’s an idea to spread the Google wealth: create an “Exquisite Corpse” font project. Set up a font template and hire 75 type designers to each design a single, assigned glyph. No designer may see what the other designers are doing. If the resulting font becomes a hit, you’ve made a work of art! If the font stinks, hire another 75 designers and start again.
Hin-Tak, maybe we can finally sort out the remaining edges of FontVal and wrap it up nicely. Missing italics, missing latin script language support in popular Latin fonts, more fonts, these are all clear needs of the GF library to me
Right, for like a decade the subset definitions didn't include a lot of stuff that was in a few mega-glyph-set families, so they weren't possible to use via the web API, but with the recent addition of all Noto fonts in fonts.google.com/noto then subsets for everything in Noto were developed - and now we can add API serving support for them.
The issue to solve this is here, https://github.com/googlefonts/gftools/issues/602
That's more or less the basis of my collaborative typeface design sketching workshop:
You have a class of say 30 people draw 30 sketches with pencil on A4 paper in say 10 minutes, then bring them all to the front/hallway and lay them all down, and then the instructor (or by a more democratic method) picks a 'survivor' and then ahem selection pressure is applied to kill off the others. The survivor is snapped from a phone and projected on the classroom projector, and then they all have another 10 minutes to draw a new generation based on the survivor's DNA. Next iteration, they add more glyphs. Next iteration, instead of higher mutation due to redrawing by eye, don't project to the front, but photocopy the survivor for every participant to trace from and extend the existing design with additional glyphs, possibly upgrading to A3 size paper or using the scaling feature of the photocopier. Loop the process.
I did this at a few of the Understanding Fonts and then Crafting Type workshops, and I initially proposed it to the OSP.kitchen folks in Brussels in 2007 or so.
I then developed this process in response to the putrid smell that arises from direct collaboration on typeface designs, some decade ago when I was directing development of such real-time collab features in FontForge -
- but FontForge was a creaky foundation and the feature bitrot quickly. Today the most relevant implementation is Simon Cozens' GlyphsApp CritParty Plugin (repo on Github):
Those 2 experiences led to the discussions about 5 years with Jeremie Hornus at Black[Foundry] about CJK font development, that led to RoboCJK. RoboCJK AFAIK has never been presented at any conference, at least not one with a video online, but its recent successor, Fontra, was presented this year at the NYC Typographics TypeLab:
In RoboCJK there is no real-time collab, rather it is "turn based" - like an 80s/90s RPG - where you can "lock and check out" some glyph set and then check in your improvements, possibly subject to view. This makes it more straightforward to organize the "evolutionary peer production" method of the workshop, I think.
Hin-Tak Leung said:
FontVal is cool... but an instant checker like the "local font" feature of Rosetta Type's Hyperglot or Roel Nieskens' WakamaiFondue are nice for a really quick inspection of a font's language, character and OpenType Feature/Axes support.
I designed PyFontaine to be a "swiss army knife" for rapidly developing unicode character set checker based profiles, but the problem with that, hyperglot, CLDR, and most other language checkers is that they go off unicodes only.
In response to that critique, Simon Cozens recently developed ShaperGlot (repo on Github) which does OpenType feature code analysis too, so that for example you can tell if a Latin font containing unicodes for Dutch or Turkish actually supports those languages with the required features, which are auto-generated by editors like GlyphsApp.
Regarding VTT etc... completely wild suggestion: pay @Georg Seifert enough money to open-source glyphapp
Specifically, she uses them in annotating choral sheet music. Of typefaces with IPA support currently available, I was going to say Montserrat is her favorite… but in fact she is getting fallback and not realizing it!
https://www.monotype.com/company/news/monotype-acquires-bertholds-renowned-typeface-inventory
lol
They saw this thread and decided to get ahead :-))
Just because the business deal has closed does not mean they are ready to pivot on such things. It may well be months—perhaps MANY months—before Monotype changes the EULA or brings them under the Monotype EULA.
Perhaps the wackiness of the Berthold EULA will make this a higher priority, but don’t expect it to be in place tomorrow.
STIX Two Text: based on 10pt metal Times.
I remember installing the original STIX fonts on my computer, and having to remove them, because there was some atrocious bounding box issue that meant that, at least in programs like WordPad, the font simply didn't work properly. I am glad to see this is corrected.
What is "centerline version"?