On 13-4-2010 1:03, Khaled Hosny wrote:
Fontforge in script mode does not require X, mingw is enough, and AFAIK latest FF CVS can be compiled under mingw without patching. One can always run FF under some virtual machine etc. But to run Windows I need a Windows license which I cannot afford.
there are some issues when using it as library also, you don't need a windows licence to run a program under wine (but i can be wrong)
They have the very right to pick the tools they won't, but this is alienating many potential contributors, an that what I was complaining about.
well, it's their project and given their full agenda i can imagine that dealing with many contributers (managing) is not that high on their agenda; the couple of discussions there were when the fonts were developed (should this accent be a few nanometers more this or that way) already took quite some time and energy as said: patches or suggestions with respect to ordening of the glyphs cq features are less problematic (and welcome) than endless discussions about shapes (and coming up with arguments why to reject them)
They already shipped glyphs with such poor artistic value, being in the Ghostscript fonts is not an excuse, they could have resorted to the original URW fonts, which were released under GPL, from the start if quality is so high priority to them. So, I don't see how welcoming potential contributers can be any worse, it might actually improve the miserable state of some areas of the fonts.
the miserable shaped would have been improved if there had been any interest in it but a fact is that neither greek nor cyrillic users ever gave any feedback (about right shapes to start with) and as such they became a burden. Of course greek has to be brought in (maybe from px/tx) again when math is done. of course, if someone would provide the perfect cyrillic / greek shapes that would be great but even then adding them officially should go through the team and be part of the normal assembling process so, feel free to come up with or improve shapes (i suppose that the team wants them in metatype 1 format) ... the gust foundry people are quite open and show up at tex meetings on a regular basis (also to give detailed progress reports) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------