Tom Bigelajzen » Ubuntu

Ubuntu Font Hebrew Subset now has an issue on Launchpad

Tom Bigelajzen — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:55:30 +0000

I opened an issue on launchpad and it was added to the Ubuntu Font Family Wishlist queue.

As an added bonus Mark Shuttleworth himself gave his blessing to this design effort (!)
It was a fun mail to start the day with

I want to quote one thing he wrote:

It *would* be useful if you could start building up a Hebrew community that can provide early and accurate feedback to DM when they start the Hebrew design process.

And later, Paul Sladen wrote:

developing a typeface takes a very long-time (months and months), and although
work on Hebrew won’t be incorporated until the Ubuntu 11.04 development cycle,
it is very useful to start working on it now!

So, I really want to start working on it seriously (too bad I didn’t start this before August Penguin…)
This week I guess I’ll finish the initial design with the good tips I got from Paul Sladen and from Maxim Ioresh, but this is only the beginning:

A real OpenType font must be created and refined, people need to test it, to find where it breaks.
And there are more variants - we have to do the Bold font, the Italic and Bold Italic, and by the time these will be finished there most likely be some Condensed variants too… so I need designers, typographers and testers to pitch in, we have a bit more than 6 months, it’s enough, but not a lot of time for a community project.

Original post: http://tombigel.com/2010/08/26/hebrew-for-the-ubuntu-font/

This is fun! I love Open Source.

Ubuntu Font, Last Update for the Weekend

Tom Bigelajzen — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:01:36 +0000

Had a solid advance with the design this weekend, some more letters have been finalized (ג, ל, ת), others have better variants to choose from (צ, ש, ק).

But – I’ve got to a point where i need some more eyes to look at the design.

In version 0.7 I colored the glyphs that I’m not yet happy with their current form, or have some variants we need to choose from.
I also numbered the letters so It will be easier for non Hebrew speakers to point to a specific glyph.

Ubuntu Font Heb v0.7.pdf
Ubuntu Font Heb v0.7.ai

Ubuntu Font Update

Tom Bigelajzen — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:12:14 +0000

Just a quick update:

I got some good tips from Maxim Ioresh (Creator of the Culmus Fonts Project) and had some insights of my own regarding some of the glyphs.

I am much more confident now that the design will be completed real fast.

New Versions:

Ubuntu Hebrew Font 0.6 – PDF
Ubuntu Hebrew Font 0.6 – Adobe Illustrator

Hebrew for the Ubuntu Font (UPDATED)

Tom Bigelajzen — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:53:12 +0000

On October 10th Ubuntu will launch it’s new version “Maverick Meerkat” and with it a new free and open source beautiful font simply called the Ubuntu Font.

Many foreign glyphs, and specifically Hebrew glyphs for this font are scheduled only for the next Ubuntu release (Natty Narwhal) on April 2011.

Update 2: Getting there! A cleaned up version (0.7) http://tombigel.com/2010/08/28/ubuntu-font-last-update-for-the-weekend/

Update 1: A new version of the work file (0.6) http://tombigel.com/2010/08/27/ubuntu-font-update/

An unusual muse found me today and I decided to try and design Hebrew glyphs for this font, and just maybe finish it fast enough so it will get into the October release.
Update: Too late for new additions to Maverick, say the good people of Ubuntu. bummer.

So , the 2 links below are a PDF and an Adobe Illustrator CS4 work file (Yeah.. bad me, using propriety software…) of today’s work, I’ll add more versions as I go along.

Lior Kaplan of Hamakor, Dor (Ddorda) and Yaron of Ubuntu Israel are also in the loop, and together we will try to get this font into the Ubuntu Font mix asap.

BTW:

If you are a Hebrew font designer and wish to help, please contact me, I don’t know too much about the technicalities of TrueType font creation – Ligatures, Kerning, etc.
Any help will be appreciated.

And if you are working for Ubuntu – What do you say? If we work fast enough, can we add this to Maverick? Please?

Ubuntu Hebrew Font 0.5 – PDF Preview
Ubuntu Hebrew Font 0.5 – Adobe Illustrator .ai file

Ubuntu Karmic Tip: Change Gnome Language Indicator to Flag Icons

Tom Bigelajzen — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:46:14 +0000

There is a long time debate in the Gnome and Ubuntu community about the use of national flags as language indicators instead of country codes.

The basic argument is that for many languages there are several nationalities that use them, and that using flags as indicators might hurt the feelings of just annoy people (What do you use for English? American flag? UK flag? Maybe Australian flag? etc.).

Further more, in the past there were incidents with the use of some controversial flags that pissed of other nationalities (I’m sure there is a link for that somewhere, can’t find it), so eventually the use of flags as indicators was abandoned.

But what if you don’t care about all this dispute and just want the freedom to use nice icons instead of plain text? There is a fairly simple solution:

The solution is based on this forum post: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ubuntu-63/keyboad-indicator-icons-575083/ , this technique should work on all Ubuntu versions from Feisty to Karmic.

Step 1:

Goto http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/ download the free flags package and extract the /png directory (I will use ~/Downloads/ in this example)

Step 2:

Copy or move the contents of this directory to /usr/share/pixmaps (I read that ~/.icons/flags might work too, haven’t tried it):

sudo mv ~/Downloads/png/* /usr/share/pixmaps/

Step 3:

From the menu launch Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration Editor, and drill down to desktop -> gnome -> peripherals -> keyboard -> indicator.

Check the useFlags checkbox, your language indicator will immediately change from text to the corresponding flag.