It looks real nice, but there is still a lot of work.

It’s published on the Canonical Design Blog – http://design.canonical.com/2010/09/intial-hebrew-trials/.

I commented there, and I urge other to comment too.

Three reasons -

First, as far as I can tell the design and development is not yet open, and the sharing of knowledge and work process is not clear to me.

Second, Work, Work, Work… I can’t give this project the attention it deserves and don’t have the time to do redundant work (As long as the work process is not well defined, I can’t be sure I don’t).

Third, No offense DM people, but judging from some of the public talks I read it doesn’t feel like the design is going in a direction I want to take part of at this stage. It feels like there is no real understanding of Hebrew typography in the process (Again – No pun intended, just a personal hunch) and also I felt that there was a bit of a disturbance when I announced my little project, someones pride got hurt or something. I felt it between the lines in some of the  correspondence I had.

I don’t want this.

I want to wait till the smoke clears, maybe DM will give us the best font ever, maybe not.
This font will eventually be released under an open license, and if we won’t like it, we will change it. Or create another. Or just accept it.
Whatever the community will go for.

Till then, I’ll try to keep track and have my say in the design team’s blog and the issues on launchpad, but I won’t actively design my own version.

I got a lot of feedback and many good tips, thank you everybody
I’m doing my best to take them all into account.

I was trying to add some Hebrew glyphs to a font file, but the free font creation programs I tried (FontForge and the Demo of TypeTool) are not so friendly, it will take some more time to do.

Links to v0.8:
PDF file
Illustrator CS4 File

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.

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

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

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

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.