ian weller

another double post: Fedora’s fonts and more datanommer

First off, fonts. The Fedora Project has used MgOpen Modata for a while now as its official font. It’s a free font and loosely resembles the font in our logo.

We just have a few issues with it — namely, it doesn’t support a lot of glyphs needed to even spell some of our contributors’ names, let alone speak in other languages. Here’s a few examples of where MgOpen Modata fails:

The top two are names of Fedora contributors. The accents versions of letters above are not available in the font, so in Inkscape, they are replaced by the system default font (which I believe is DejaVu). Those are highlighted in red. The third line is a line in Russian, nabbed from the Russian translation of the wiki’s home page. The only character in that line rendered as Modata is the question mark at the end of the line.

Mo kicked off the discussion on finding a new font a little over a week ago. As the discussion continued, it was decided that the best candidate for the font was Comfortaa, a font licensed under a CC BY-ND license, which is not permissible for inclusion in Fedora. Mo sent an email to the font author asking for the license to be changed, and we received wonderful news back.

That’s not to say the search is over — we still need your feedback and suggestions. We don’t plan on using Comfortaa as a body text font, only as a headline font; the front runner is Droid Sans (Droid Serif for print). If you can suggest a better typeface for either the headline or body text fonts, please let us know! Either comment on this blog post or send an email to the design-team list.

Edit: Here’s some samples of Comfortaa, as suggested by Nicu.

Second, datanommer. (om nom nom) A couple of weeks ago, I posted to the datanommer list a totally new way forward for the datanommer project, based on feedback from the target audience to datanommer as well as members of the Infrastructure team.

The new new master plan is to provide a simple executable, aptly named “datanommer”. It reads a configuration file which specifies queries to be run on different applications. Here’s an example query file, currently checked in to the git repo:

[memcached]
servers = 127.0.0.1:11211

[module:wikipedia]
path = mediawiki.MediaWiki
api_url = http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

[data:wikipedia.recently_active_editors]
grapher = matplot.bar_chart
grapher.ylabel = Edit count
num = 10

[module:fedorawiki]
path = mediawiki.MediaWiki
api_url = https://fedoraproject.org/w/api.php

[data:fedorawiki.recently_active_editors]
grapher = matplot.bar_chart
grapher.ylabel = Edit count
num = 10

Now, what on earth does this do? It fetches up to the latest 1000 edits on a MediaWiki, specifically the Fedora Project’s wiki and Wikipedia, determines the top ten editors, and places them on a bar graph created with matplotlib. The Fedora Project graph looks something like this. Neato!

Next up — the part I’m planning to work on this week — is the part that creates an HTML presentation for the data. Of course, totally configurable. After that, it’s the endless process of writing code to pull data from miscellaneous applications. Which you, of course, can help with. (Documentation coming soon!)

Tags: comfortaa, datanommer, fedora, fonts, mgopen modata, wiki