[Sugar-devel] [GSOC] Font Editor Next Steps

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

On 16 May 2016 at 17:07, Sam P. <sam at sam.today> wrote:

> Lionel - we've already discussed this before.
>

Sure, and while I posited a conclusion (that JS is strategic but Py is
perhaps richer today) I am happy to revise it. In particular my reasoning
for Py was that the Sugar Desktop has 100,000s of known daily active users
in schools, but Sugarizer appears to have no schools using it daily yet,
and since the font editor GSOC is about core systems work, it seemed to me
to make more sense to work with the Sugar desktop - even though I dearly
wish the core systems focus was on Sugarizer :)

But I realised after posting this reasoning that sugar-web makes it
possible to package a JS app for the Sugar desktop, so the addressable
market is actually the same for JS and Py based Activities.


> Python is objectively better for every activity; Gtk+ is more stable, has
> more stability, creates better code quality and supports collaboration.
>

I don't know if a PyGTK based is more stable than a web based UI; but it
seems both are very stable.

Code quality is not related to language

It seems odd to me to imply that web applications do not support real time
collaboration.

What I can say is that, in the last 2 weeks since I suggested we try a GTK
approach, Yash and Eli have found it difficult to learn how to create a
font editor prototype with PyGTK in the last week, but both already have
web development skills that mean that they could have spent a week
developing a prototype instead of learning a new toolset.



> But for the font editor world, python has even more advantages. There are
> tonnes of libraries for font editing and none of them are for the
> 'JavaScript' language. They are for python.
>

In the last 3 years myself and some others were able to fund the
development of JS libraries that match the python ones (sources: defcon /
ufoJS, binaries: fontTools / OpenType.js) For a while the JS ones were
ahead (with source to binary compilation) and now they are more or less at
parity.


> I don't think it will ever be ported to sugarizer even. Sugatizer is just
> cheap in comparison to the smooth and feature rich sugar environment. Who
> wants to edit fonts in a browser?
>

I think this is the future, which is why I funded www.metapolator.com
heavily.

-- 
Cheers
Dave
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