David Crossland and Conrad Taylor will lead discussion about the challenges and issues in Open Source font development at a meeting of the British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) supported by the Electronic Publishing Specialist Group (EPSG) on Tuesday 11th December 2007 from 1800 hours at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA. The meeting is open and free to all to attend.

The discussion will include these topics:

* how digital fonts are designed and what are the technical, linguistic and aesthetic issues involved

* business and licensing models for fonts; and the problems of serving minority language communities and specialist  scientific/technical communities caused by the standard business model

* the opportunities and problems of “free-of-cost” and ”free-as-in-freedom” (open source) fonts

* the relation of open source collective/peer production to the aesthetic challenges of designing a harmonious new font

* a vision of how multilingual computing with Unicode and OpenType can assist the literacy and economic development of developing nations and linguistically diverse cultures

The evening will include a demonstration of relevant tools including FontForge, and some of the existing font projects like DejaVu and Gentium.

After the first hour and break, there will be extensive opportunities to discuss the issues and software presented, the business models that support free software and how they might apply to font software, and how you can get involved in the font community in such areas as software engineering, desktop user interface design, web-app development, and of course designing new fonts!

Dave Crossland:
is currently studying in the MA Typeface Design programme in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. He has worked for over 5 years as a GNU/Linux systems administrator, and runs a small IT consultancy in his hometown of Bournemouth. He has used Debian since 1999, and believes strongly in the principles of freedom and community that underpin the software freedom movement.

Conrad Taylor:
has been working as a typographic designer and industrial design educator for 30 years, and has a particular interest in multi-script typesetting issues. He is currently the Chair of the BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group.

To book a place at this event please email your name to the OSSG events coordinator: events@ossg.bcs.org

Free buffet and refreshments including wine available from around 1800 hours.

For further information please contact Paul Adams at chair@ossg.bcs.org

Map & directions: http://www.epsg.org.uk/locations/bcsss-guide.html

Adriaan de Groot will give a talk about the new KDE 4 release for the BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) on Thursday 1st November 2007 from 1830 hours at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA.

The KDE 4.0 release is one of the most anticipated software events in the Free software desktop world today.

This talk, which in true OSSG style is open to all to attend, will take us on a tour of what KDE 4 will bring to your desktop with technologies such as Plasma, Solid, Phonon, SVG and more as well as take a look at some of the new and updated applications that will be arriving with KDE 4.0 including the Okular universal reader and the groupware Akonadi system.

We will wrap up with an overview of the community behind and around KDE at how you too can get involved in a variety of ways, ranging from software development to documentation to quality assurance to translating to promotion, and help KDE 4 be the best desktop the world has seen in the process.

Adriaan de Groot is a Canadian by birth and a Dutchman by training. He lives in the Netherlands and works in Greece with his German colleagues. As a researcher in (Free) Software Quality, he travels in Europe trying to spread the word on quality checking tools and Free Software.

Adriaan’s first Open Source project started in 1989 when visual editors on serial consoles were all the rage. He contributed bits and pieces to other projects until settling down with the KDE project where he works on synchronizing PalmOS-based handhelds with the desktop; he also works on FreeBSD and OpenSolaris portability. Free Software takes up most of his work day.

Adriaan is a member of the board of directors of KDE e.V. and a member of the board of directors of the NLUUG.

To book a place at this event please email your name to the events coordinator.

Free buffet and refreshments including wine available from around 1800 hours.

For further information please contact Paul Adams at chair@ossg.bcs.org