Dear All, I would like to announce that there will be an IRC meeting on Tuesday, 1st August 2006, to discuss issues about fonts for free and open-source software.

The agenda includes 1. discussion on availability of free & open-source fonts for different scripts/languages. 2. discussion on free & open-source font licenses; importance to converge to a common license. 3. consult users from Asia for the local preference of fonts.

The meeting takes place on Tuesday, 1st August 2006, at 12:00 UTC (GMT/Zulu). This is morning for the US, early in the afternoon for Europe and afternoon/evening for Asia/Australia. Visit http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2006&month=8&a... to view the exact time for your area.

The meeting takes place on IRC, at the Freenode network, on channel ##fonts. Notice the channel name, it is "##fonts", with two pound signs. Unfortunatelly, the channel with one pound sign has already been registered for non-free font discussions.

If you have not used IRC before, you can use the IRC client "XChat" that is provided with your Linux distribution. You can also install XChat for Windows. XChat is also available from http://www.xchat.org/

For more, please see http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts_2fConfiguration

The discussion logs will be made available after the meeting, at http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts_2fConfiguration

Fonts are very important to distributions, desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, etc), as well as to individual cross-platform applications. The end-user would typically blame the application if the fonts do not appear well. At the same time, the process of choosing suitable fonts for different languages and scripts is complex enough for a single project to handle.

At the same time I would like to announce that there is interest to have more regular discussions on IRC on issues pertaining to fonts. Therefore, if you would like to discuss free and open-source fonts, feel free to pop by ##fonts on Freenode.

Feel free to forward this announcement to other relevant lists.

Thanks, Simos