There are some things a free desktop just can't do without: a web browser, music player and, oh yes, clipart! Looking at the selection available by default on a standard Linux install, you might begin to envy your colleagues who use Microsoft Word, and then you notice their snazzy font selection. Well worry no more, for two projects are here to supply all the illegible fonts and amusing stick men your hard drive can keep track of.

The Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) has been running for a few years now, hosting clipart produced in the open, well supported SVG format. All of the entries are freely licensed or released into the public domain, and you're actively encouraged to contribute your own scribbles to the repository.

The Open Font Library (OFL) has recently launched to collect public domain fonts, using the ccHost software developed by the ccMixter community to facilitate "remixes" of fonts. How can a font be remixed, you ask? When the Bitstream Vera font family was released under a free license people noticed that it was missing lots of special characters, so the DejaVu font family was started to expand the range. It now covers Latin (Western and Central European, African Latin and International Phonetic alphabets), Cyrillic (European) and Greek (Modern and Polytonic), Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew and Lao character sets.

More than most free culture projects, the OCAL and the OFL bring the free culture and software worlds together, demonstrating how free content can enhance the value of free software and vice versa.

There are so many imaginative ways in which free software applications could make use of these repositories. For example, office applications could provide a user interface that makes it trivial to download and install new fonts and clipart. Unlike most of their proprietary competitors, free software developers are in a position to sit down with their counterparts behind the font subsystem, desktop environments and OpenFonts and bash out a common framework to make it really slick.

Mozilla Firefox, of course, allows users to browse extensions on their web site, with installation and management made trivial. KDE has something similar in GetHotNewStuff, an aptly named framework that lets any application pull down content from KDE-Look (artwork) and KDE-Files (templates, clipart, etc.) But how much better would it be if OpenOffice, KOffice, the GNOME Office programs and others all shared a method to grab new fonts and clipart and install them so that they were available system-wide?

Debian currently provides a package of OCAL files through APT, which includes the ability to have them show up in OpenOffice.org. But the implementation falls far short of the flexibility and usability of KDE's GetHotNewStuff framework, which is still pretty rough around the edges.

It could work the other way as well. Graphics applications like Krita and Inkscape could include "send to OpenClipArt" buttons, making submission trivial. Inkscape already enables you to embed license information in SVGs and Creative Commons have a nice tool that uploads files to ccHost, the platform that OpenFonts and soon OpenClipArt run on.

Having browsed through the OpenClipArt web site fairly often, however, I wonder if it will ever replace proprietary collections or those produced in-house. Of course the project is under no obligation to do either of those things, but it would rather hold the dependent applications back from their quest for market domination.

My musings on integration with applications raises the biggest problem with the projects. Imagine trying to find the right clipart, or appropriate font, by wading through thousands of randomly tagged submissions made by people doodling in Inkscape and FontForge. Look behind the buzz around Web 2.0 and social categorisation, where web site visitors can help sort submissions by tagging them, and you find that the techniques are actually only useful for quite specific scenarios. It works brilliantly for Flickr, the photo-sharing web site, where you just want to filter through hundreds of thousands of photos to find something vaguely relevant. But when it comes to fonts, and to an extent clipart, you don't want to be wading through that many sub-par glyphs to find a print-quality serif font to suit your booklet.

It's a problem of categorisation, but also of range and depth. When one of the more prodigious contributors uploaded a range of female silhouettes a wag quipped that OCAL now catered for hookers' business cards. Jon Phillips, one of the OCAL developers, responded that the images "helps us push the boundaries", which may be true, but I'd sooner find good coverage of the basic images.

What OCAL and OFL really need are a drive to produce a decent, core content with a good depth and range. With that in place, the collaborative nature of the projects could fill in all of the gaps, from extra unicode characters to erotic silhouettes. Then the free desktop could really shine.