http://decodeunicode.org Is an independent online-platform for digital type culture, initiated by the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany. The project is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and has the objectives of creating a basis for fundamental typographic research and facilitating a textual approach to […]

Xara Xtreme is a vector based software. It runs under Windows and Linux environment. It is a “crossover” software, means it manages pixels and vectors at the same time. After 15 years of proprietary software status, Xara is operating a strategical migration to open source. The fact that Adobe purchased Macromedia put the developper in […]

Reporting bugs is frustrating work. I feel pretty stupid when a bug apparently was already reported months ago (was it worth reporting? Am I simply annoying developers by telling them once again something does not work? Should I have spent even more time finding duplicates?), but at the same time it would be worse when […]

Often I have wondered why DTP programmes did not have both an “edit source” view and a “preview mode”, so that you could alternate between those two views and apply styles with more rigour if needed.

Le Tigre, here, is not the translation of a Mac os in french, nor a No-Wave grrrrl band. It’s a brand new generalist weekly french magazine that released its first issue 3 days ago. The big thing here is that this mag is entirely set on Scribus, and proove by fact that this FLOSS can […]

From WORDS MADE FLESH Code, Culture, Imagination by Florian Cramer (p22) The idea that beauty materializes in numerical proportions according to mathematical laws continues to be popular in scientific and engineering cultures, too. Since the early 1970s, Donald Knuth, widely considered the founder of computer science as an independent academic discipline, published his textbooks under […]

http://www.dustismo.com/ Domestic Manners, by Dustin Norlander. “This font is basically my handwritting. Why anyone would want to use my crappy handwritting for anything, I can’t say. It would be a good way to forge a note from me I guess. Anyway, use it for whatever you want, its released under the GPL so change it […]

http://www.orgdot.com/aliasfonts/ (c) 2001 http://www.orgdot.com: you can copy, use, modify and distribute this code and/or artwork for educational, commercial or recreational use.

Thanks to Philip May and Perl5 software that generated text, it was possible to realise a double spread of a “Babels book”. Text is composed of the combinatory of the 26 letters of the alphabet, dot, comma and space, as described in Library of Babel, in Fictions Borges book. Those books are 410 page, 40 […]

The “user-friendly” distribution Ubuntu is distributing its font under the LGPL. I have not heard the same from other distributions. It seems that Redhat or Novell do not want to share their corporate identity with the rest of us. Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth, who sold his company Thawte(a company that issues security certificates) to become […]

The open source font Gentium and The SIL Open Font License are both developed and distributed by S.I.L., also known as The Summer Institute for Linguistics, apparently a subsidiary of the Wicliffe Bible Translators. S.I.L. has developed large-scale ethno-linguistic research projects such as http://www.ethnologue.org, an attempt to map all indigenous languages of the world. The […]