Re: [unifont] Unifont for GNU

[Roman Czyborra]

Dear Karl:

On Sun, 31 Mar 2013, Karl Berry wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
>    Dear RMS: can we perhaps get a GNU Mailman password for a
>    coordination list address@hidden
>
> You don't need rms for that :).
> I set up the list simply as "address@hidden".

Great, thank you for this lovely Easter egg!  We will use it to go about 
hatching a unifont-6.1.tar.gz plus accompanying web page with joint force.

Am I the only one who subscribed yet?  Should I wait before posting until 
we have recruited enough subscribers on the relevant distributions that 
spring into my mind or is every publication to the list immediately 
archived via some NNTP repository or some standard-breaking other 
path?

> Anyone can subscribe at https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/unifont.
> (I hope/trust it's ok if it's a public list.)

I am very conservative at being against destruction of the good old 
liberties and it would hurt me to install barriers to participation and 
barriers to academic crediting of all the contributors and do not deem 
information a hazard and would rather be a little too optimistic and 
tolerant than too pessimistic and repressive against believed to be 
threatening bit sequences.

The GNU mailman robot seems to allow anyone to conceal herself from the 
subscribers list:

Conceal yourself from subscriber list?
When someone views the list membership, your email address is normally 
shown (in an obscured fashion to thwart spam harvesters). If you do not 
want your email address to show up on this membership roster at all, 
select Yes for this option. [ ] Yes [X] No

> I used our generic owner address so you wouldn't be bothered with the
> inevitable spam.  If you need to change the list configuration somehow,
> let me know, no problem to send you the password.

I know that Paul prefers to keep his personal address unpublished and 
concentrate on his work somewhat undisturbed.

But since I get incredibly good spam filtering and sufficient message 
storage for just 5$/a I would rather ignore 100 pieces of spam than 
suppress 1 gem of science of utter worth for the project.

Therefore I would prefer the list being administered by my account roman 
at czyborra dot com whose unencrypted current password I suggest as a 
mnemonic administration password matching this list's subject backed up by 
listhelper-moderate at gnu dot org and whoever else of us wants to help.

> BTW, is there any relationship between GNU freefont and GNU unifont?
> Just wondering.

I would not say:

> No.

The ideas are related, freedom-to-friendliness-restricting font licenses 
simply suck, unifont aimed first at being a low-tech bandwidth-minimal 
language-unbiased bitmap-pixel solution so you could decipher utf-8 
without looking up every sequence in a dictionary, and 
https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/ aims at solving the same problem 
with more perfection with a whole series of outline fonts.

Now they are not just diverging but als converging: The fantastic 
scalability of the unifont.{hex,bdf} to unifont.ttf came out of the Debian 
community and if at some point a freefont.ttf had nice ideographs which 
the unifont yet had not, we will have all liberty to rasterize and include.

>    if possible resend the old requirements you had composed and resent
>    me a couple of times into my then overburdened and now seemingly
>    irrevokably destroyed mailbox?
>
> You do need rms for that :).  Good luck.

I'm patiently waiting for his grep czyborra results.  As an old wannabe 
archeologists I welcome copies of all historical messages relevant to the 
GNU intlfonts, etl-unicode, utf-fonts and unifont for my collection for 
posteriority.

I skimmed some names I could recover from the 
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/gnu-unifont/messages/1 to which 
yahoo.com after having purchased the egroups.com site has totally screwed 
my access and orphaned the 
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/gnu-unifont/members?group=mod and 
denied I had ever had accounts there upon a complaint from my lawyer.

After Dennis Ritchie we have now also terminally lost Marc Crispin shortly 
after last Christmas.

I also corrected the one bouncing gmail dot org address to gmail dot com 
and resent everything missed due to my typo to it just to keep in the 
circle one of our fontforge experts with an expressed interest in getting 
the software driving GNU/Linux/Hurd/*BSD consoles, POSIX/X11 libraries, 
Emacs, Lynx, Links, Alpine, Firefox derivates, Chromium derivates to 
fallback to our unifont glyphs instead of acting like it was born 
yesterday and display empty boxes as if there were no Unicode when their 
fonts don't cover the defined universe.

There have been other delightful messages piling up that I want to answer 
but I am swapping to my math homework now until I receive more 
clarification on our communication channel.

Happy Easter Monday till then: Roman