We have made AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType) available for Mac OS X and Windows, but we also realize that these are not the only OSes that font developers prefer to use. In an effort to make AFDKO more appealing to more font developers, and more broadly available, we’d like to gauge the interest in supporting additional OSes, particularly Linux and other Unix-like OSes (mainly because AFDKO tools are, for the most part, batch- and command-line driven).
All of the AFDKO tools that need to be compiled have been written in ANSI C, but setting up the environments and project files requires some amount of effort, thus our desire to gauge interest in such an effort before making an investment that is measured in time and resources.
If you, as a font developer, prefer to use an OS other than Mac OS X or Windows as your primary development environment, please post a comment, being sure to indicate the details of the OS on which you’d like AFDKO tools to run.
ADDED ON 02/16/2012: Interested readers should also consider commenting on our sibling blog’s post about the same subject → CLICK HERE ←
Comments
Oh, and please do not make any requests for SunOS.
Been there, done that… ☺
For linux, both .deb and .rpm packages to provide no-brainer installs on the main Debian based distros (debian, ubuntu etc) and Fedora, Suse. Release the source code too
😉
Please dont do what Spotify do – keep the source closed and only release a.deb for Ubuntu :-/
Thank you for these details. With regard to releasing the source code, it is best to think of this as a “baby steps” thingie.
I only work on Linux. However, to be honest, I’m just a hobby designer…
Even if I’m able to run some programs of AFDKO under Linux with wine, I definitively like to see a port of AFDKO for Linux . I’m actually using Ubuntu 10 LTS 32bit .
Linux of course
🙂
I’m not sure, but I don’t see Adobe selling the FDKO and I don’t think there is even a business model around it, so it might be a lot simpler to just release the code which would delegate a good deal of porting and packaging to distributors (IIRC, the Python code is already under a permissive BSD-like license).
I develop under Linux, and I’d love to have a feature file compiler that actually works. I’m currently using FontForge and that’s quite buggy. Being able to switch to AFDKO would be nice. But there’s no point if it’ll be binary-only, because even if I might tolerate that, my users won’t. You can say “baby steps” all you want, but binary-only is a dealbreaker for widespread adoption in the Linux world.
We fully appreciate and understand the desire for the Linux community to access the source code, but keep in mind that Adobe is a big ship that doesn’t turn on a dime, hence the appropriateness of the “baby steps” comment.
The thing on which to focus on is the direction, particularly that doing what is what is being considered is in the right direction. Where it goes beyond that depends on other factors that haven’t been worked out yet.
Please (continue to) be patient with us…
I use Debian GNU/Linux for my main development, so a .deb would work excellently for me. I do have a mac on standby, though, because I sometimes fire up the Adobe tools. But it would be far better to do it on just one machine. (Outside of testing.)
Ken, i appreciate that Adobe are not in a position to release source quite yet, my point is really though that if the source is closed then it’s good to have a choice of binaries for the different main Linux OS’s. -v
There’s only 2 sensible formats to support in the Linux world. RPM and DEB. Fringe distros like Arch should have known better than to pointlessly create yet another package format.
Yes please!
I am using Debian, but I disagree with the comments above about distributing .rpm and .deb. This is error prone, and debs are often for a limited class of releases.
I suggest to release a tar ball with instructions on installation, and let the distributions work out the packaging.
I myself being a Debian developer know where well how often formats, dependency names etc. Please do NOT try to provide packages, or at least also tar files. Distributions will ship the stuff in contrib/non-free/whatever.
If you want to make it even easier, it would be great to allow redistribution, so that Debian etc could include them in the non-free part and users can install them via the respective package manager.
And, as also TeX Live developer, we would be happy to see it open source so that we can include it in TeX Live.
If you need any help regarding Debian, please let me know.
Norbert