[Pkg-fonts-devel] forming new maintenance team for MPH 2B Damase?

[Paul Wise]

Hi all,

[please CC me on any replies]

MPH 2B Damase is a public domain font implementing some of the newer
parts of Unicode 4.1. A short description of it is here:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-mph-2b-damase

The author hasn't had time to work on it for a long time, so I suggested
that a maintenance team could be formed in order to keep it up to date,
add more glyphs and so on. Is anyone interested in helping form such a
team and working on MPH 2B Damase?

PS: If anyone is a regular on typophile.com and would like to post this
message there, please do.

For those who might be interested, here is my email exchange with the
author:

> On 06/02/07, Paul Wise <pabs at debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > I note that fixedsys.org is still not back up. Have you updated MPH
> > 2B Damase at all and placed it on a new website? If not, do you
> > think it would be a good idea to convert it to a fontforge .sfd file
> > or two, create a sourceforge or savannah project to maintain it on
> > and solicit for maintainers amongst the free fonts community? I'm
> > sure some of the people who commented on the debian package
> > inclusion would help out. Do you know if it uses any features
> > fontforge does not support?
>
> No, I haven't updated the font (although I did intend to at one point,
> I'm pretty sure now it's not going to happen, at least not for a few
> years) nor have I placed it on a new website. I don't know if it uses
> any features fontforge doesn't support -- the main issues that I would
> anticipate are how diacritics are done (I don't remember the technical
> terms, but the way I did it, iirc, is "illegal", where each
> precomposed character actually calls upon the diacritic and the base
> character and combines them on the spot), and the use of characters
> beyond the BMP (although by now, any font editor that can't handle
> that is essentially worthless, so I'm assuming that is not an issue
> with fontforge).
> 
> You and others are welcome to do any or all of the things you
> suggested, I unfortunately do not have time right now. If nobody were
> to end up doing it, I suppose I might eventually, but unfortunately I
> am very much occupied in real life at the moment and don't anticipate
> having much, if any, time to continue my amateur font foundring for
> the next couple of years, although I would be happy to answer any
> questions at all anyone might have about fonts or writing systems.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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