Selfism is a decorative typeface that mimics the look of an electronic display (like an LED clock.) It has both a regular and a bold weight. Selfism’s homepage has an interesting type treatment – in general I think Selfism, as a decorative font, can be used to provide a retro technologically-savvy feel to non-essential text in a print layout or webpage. You could also use it in an artistic type treatment of course. Actually, to be honest, you could use it to give text a shopping receipt look…
Selfism was designed by Jan Sonntag and is licensed under the Open Font License.
Selfism has some coverage beyond basic Latin – the Latin Supplementary coverage is quite good but the extended Latin coverage is poor.
- Fedora Font Wishlist Entry: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sonntag_Selfism_fonts
- Upstream Homepage: http://www.sonntag.nl/seiten/free/selfism/selfism.htm
So, you want to package Selfism?
Gee whiz! You’re fantastic! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:
Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:
And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:
Last Week’s Font
Last week’s font was Cyklop by Janusz Marian Nowacki. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?
Máirín Duffy 
Wouldn’t it be better if someone packages a load these of free fonts into a package that all the distros can then include in their repos?
Posted by rolandixor | December 9, 2009, 12:00 pmWhat do you mean? Different distros have different packaging formats – there is no one single package format that will work on all distros. Unless I’m not quite understanding your meaning?
Posted by mairin | December 9, 2009, 12:15 pmIt would not be better. Most of the font packaging work is the legal and technical review of each font file. Putting a “load” of fonts in a single package is not going to make this work any smaller, it will just create a huge unmaintainable pile of bitrotting files people are afraid of touching and no one quite knows where to start maintenance work at.
(see also: ctan and texlive. Fedora is still stuck at texlive 2007 because the “load” of files translated in something no one could sanely review and update in a finite amount of time)
One package per font family is the only way to divide the work in small manageable pieces.
A distribution like Fedora is not a file dump, if you want a huge pile of fonts with unclear licensing conditions and variable technical levels dafont and friends are available now.
Posted by Nicolas Mailhot | December 9, 2009, 2:52 pmAnd install hundred of fonts when you are only interested in one of them. Isn’t practical.
Posted by khudsa | December 9, 2009, 5:45 pmit would be nice if the FOSS community pulled together and created a website/web application+database of fully free fonts + a suite of programs (really just programs for GTK+ and Qt application platforms) that could pull in the fonts the user wants in a user friendly way (for example, the ubuntu software center lets you easily install applications). Advanced users like me could always go back to a package manager or the command line anyway :).
But, yeah, basically I think that would make life easier in relation to fonts.
P.S. I am a bit of a font junky xD… I recently looked through the fonts I could use in a document I was writing and declared on twitter: “Too many fonts… time to get more”
Posted by rolandixor | December 10, 2009, 12:15 pmoh yes, and the other thing, metapackages == dependency hell, so if this is ever done, no meta packages! D:
Posted by rolandixor | December 10, 2009, 12:17 pmrolandixor:
Have you tried openfontlibrary.org? That would be the pulling together / creating an app/database.
Posted by mairin | December 10, 2009, 12:25 pmOh I see what you’re saying now because of Nicolas’ and khudsa’s comments. I misunderstood.
If you wanted to group fonts together at least in Fedora we have or could do a fonts package group so you can install individual fonts or the whole group of them – although yum install *fonts* -y is not difficult either.
Posted by mairin | December 9, 2009, 6:29 pm