UDEC
In other news, I went to GUADEC last week in Manchester, and it was a blast. Stayed in a nice AirBNB in the trendy northwest district (just kidding; all of Manchester is trendy, and is really awesome compared to spending Yet Another Stretch in London).
This may not seem like news; I have been to GUADEC six years in a row now, but this was my first one as a real dyed-in-the-wool civilian attendee, rather than as the token Industry Reporter. Which is not to say that being there as a reporter wasn't fun; the free software community treats everyone as a member, including people whose contribution is writing about other people's contributions.
Nevertheless, it was fun to go and just listen to talks without feverishly taking notes, and to let yourself get drawn in to hallway conversations.
For my part, I helped coordinate a workshop on several up-and-coming changes to font and text-rendering support. The main one, of course, is support for OpenType variable fonts (a way of encoding weight/width/slant/arbitrary variants as deltas to an existing font, allowing interpolation on the fly). But we also talked about support for layered/chromatic fonts, emoji, and some potential niceties to add to Pango Layout.
As you might expect, there was actual work accomplished, virtually all due to the efforts of Behdad Esfahbod and Matthias Clasen. Behdad fixed emoji support in Fontconfig (which basically also buys chromatic font support for free) and Matthias got long-gestating patches into Cairo to make it all actually work.
I also learned that Matthias started out as a TeX-and-typography dude back before he became the lead GTK+ developer, which is perhaps why it's possible for us to get him excited about font stuff to this day.
Moving forward, we chatted a little bit with the GNOME design team; I'm trying to get them to revisit GNOME Font Viewer and the GtkFontChooser widget to expose some of these technical features. Matthias is all for this as well; the design team, though, wisely wants you to convince them that adding complexity is Actually A Good Thing, but I think we made progress on that front with Jakub Steiner. The question of improving Pango layout will probably get deferred until it gets more peoplepower, but Behdad made headway into adding variable font support to it, which is the crux of supporting the format in the GNOME text stack. I could say more on that later, but this probably needs to turn into an actual blog post first.
Finally, I hatched a scheme to 'level up' several open font packages with some missing smart-font features that, hopefully, will make them more usable but do not introduce any compatibility-breaking problems like a redesign might.
Then I came home. Best of all, though, it was great to see so many of my friends from the free-software world, whom I've been largely absent from for the past year as I've been buckled down studying. If you weren't there, maybe I'll see you in January when the 2018 event cycle starts up and I'll be able to travel again!
This may not seem like news; I have been to GUADEC six years in a row now, but this was my first one as a real dyed-in-the-wool civilian attendee, rather than as the token Industry Reporter. Which is not to say that being there as a reporter wasn't fun; the free software community treats everyone as a member, including people whose contribution is writing about other people's contributions.
Nevertheless, it was fun to go and just listen to talks without feverishly taking notes, and to let yourself get drawn in to hallway conversations.
For my part, I helped coordinate a workshop on several up-and-coming changes to font and text-rendering support. The main one, of course, is support for OpenType variable fonts (a way of encoding weight/width/slant/arbitrary variants as deltas to an existing font, allowing interpolation on the fly). But we also talked about support for layered/chromatic fonts, emoji, and some potential niceties to add to Pango Layout.
As you might expect, there was actual work accomplished, virtually all due to the efforts of Behdad Esfahbod and Matthias Clasen. Behdad fixed emoji support in Fontconfig (which basically also buys chromatic font support for free) and Matthias got long-gestating patches into Cairo to make it all actually work.
I also learned that Matthias started out as a TeX-and-typography dude back before he became the lead GTK+ developer, which is perhaps why it's possible for us to get him excited about font stuff to this day.
Moving forward, we chatted a little bit with the GNOME design team; I'm trying to get them to revisit GNOME Font Viewer and the GtkFontChooser widget to expose some of these technical features. Matthias is all for this as well; the design team, though, wisely wants you to convince them that adding complexity is Actually A Good Thing, but I think we made progress on that front with Jakub Steiner. The question of improving Pango layout will probably get deferred until it gets more peoplepower, but Behdad made headway into adding variable font support to it, which is the crux of supporting the format in the GNOME text stack. I could say more on that later, but this probably needs to turn into an actual blog post first.
Finally, I hatched a scheme to 'level up' several open font packages with some missing smart-font features that, hopefully, will make them more usable but do not introduce any compatibility-breaking problems like a redesign might.
Then I came home. Best of all, though, it was great to see so many of my friends from the free-software world, whom I've been largely absent from for the past year as I've been buckled down studying. If you weren't there, maybe I'll see you in January when the 2018 event cycle starts up and I'll be able to travel again!
AJ Jordan, clacke@libranet.de ❌ likes this.
clacke@libranet.de ❌, clacke@libranet.de ❌, clacke@libranet.de ❌ shared this.