Hi Gail,
I spent some time this afternoon with Felipe trying to flesh out with him exactly what his project is going to entail, and I've come to the conclusion that your two proposals are going to conflict with each other quite badly.
It will come as no surprise to you Gail that the bottleneck is Pango. Specifically, you are trying to push through a system font which Pango refuses to accept because it can't be expressed using CSS, while Felipe is trying to push through a user font which, even if it had a CSS expression, would not be available for Pango's lookup.
I can think of a couple of technical solutions to this problem and no doubt there are several more which could be done, but that's not the purpose of this e-mail. My major point is that, as they stand, your projects have sufficient overlap that I personally don't feel that it would be a good idea for them both to be accepted for SoC.
I know the deadline is almost upon us and I'm really sorry I didn't figure this out sooner. From a purely pragmatic (and cold-hearted) perspective I suspect that Gail's proposal is the easiest to change at this late stage, however given that you are both in competition with each other anyway for whatever few places that Google offers the project, it may be simpler just to accept that you are in competition and each try to make your own proposal the most compelling.
Of course if there's any way to disentangle the two that I haven't thought of I really want to hear it.
My apologies again,
Richard.