Domain: bitstream.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to bitstream.com.
Comments · 33
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Remember when Netscape could download fonts?Early versions of Netscape, through Netscape Communicator 4, could load an arbitrary font with the web page. This feature was called "Dynamic Fonts". Microsoft didn't like it, because it used Bitstream's font format. So Microsoft implemented their own proprietary scheme in IE. Web designers stopped using Dynamic Fonts. Netscape dropped Dynamic Fonts in Netscape 6.
The Bitstream PFR format is public. But Bitstream withdrew the tools that allow conversion of other fonts into PFR format, partly because of threats of litigation.
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Re:Gadget Filled
Reading that doesn't fill me with any desire to read farther.
As far as I'm concerned, "The message flashed across in chiselled 3D text" was bad enough on its own.
Cheesey, derivative sci-fi always has to have cheesey, derivative sci-fi stylings. I mean, aren't people going to want to read using a "normal" typeface in the future? Anyone with half a brain will have figured out that stylised typefaces like that will be a PITA to use for any length of time. Heck, I don't even like reading novels that use sans-serif.
One thing that grated about Babylon 5 for me was the use of the 'sci-fi' typeface to indicate the floor numbers and so on. Lets the credibility down quite a bit.... "futuristic"? Got news for you; one day the future will be the present, and people won't want futuristic typefaces just because they're "living in the future".
It's like expecting people nowadays to be using "1950s sci-fi" typefaces because that's what everyone in the 1950s thought everyone would be using in 50 years time.
Don't get me wrong; 'normal' typefaces change over time, styles change subtlely over the years such that (e.g.) you can often make a good stab at the era a book was published in simply by the typeface it used, the graphic design and so on. But the only place anything remotely resembling most of these is likely to appear is at a sci-fi convention.
Anyway, even if the story was meant to be stylised, did it have to be stylised in such a derivative way? The whole cyberpunk thing is a bit of a cliche itself now; time to move things on. -
Re:Hmm
I do suppose Opera has more experience in fitting web pages to small screens. Have they made it better?
I read the announcement quite fast, but in my understanding Nokia is going to do the browser, they are not done it yet. I might have misread it though.
About Operas quality, atleast the S60 version of Opera is quite useless given the terrible (read big and unaliased) fonts and bad layout. Hopefully Nokia makes it right, smaller, better, hopefully subpixel antialiased fonts are needed for a good browsing experience.
ThunderHawk has the font issues right. Unfortunately I haven't been able to play with it so I can't say whether it is any good otherwise.
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Re:And this is why...
Microsoft tried to butt in on Adobe's turf before with Truetype, but no one (or at least, no one important) does Truetype font libraries, Bitstream, Monotye et al all make their fonts type 1 postscript.
From Monotype:
"since more and more folks are looking for TrueType fonts, every new typeface we release is available in both formats"
From Bitstream:
"Bitstream sells fonts for Windows in TrueType, OpenType, or PostScript Type 1 format"
Looks like TrueType is doing just fine. You might want to brush up on your recent history. -
Re:Why not...
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Re:Use sans-serif, don't hardcode fonts
Sorry folks, closing backslash crept in by mistake. Too much wine drinking while reading slash.
http://www.bitstream.com/font_rendering/products/d ev_fonts/vera.html
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Re:Use sans-serif, don't hardcode fonts
Bitstream Vera available at: http://www.bitstream.com/font_rendering/products/
d ev_fonts/vera.html/ -
Eventual PPC port?
"We can be ported to many platforms that Opera can't," he said. "Mozilla has been developed to work on every flavor of Unix and every type of processor, chip or widget set."
Exciting project. I hope they eventually port Minimo to the Pocket PC; I have an iPAQ 6315 PPC Phone Edition and happily abandoned Pocket IE in favor of the far superior Thunderhawk browser. However, Thunderhawk is subscription-based ($49.95/yr), so I'd be very interested in a Mozilla port for my PPC. -
Re:Simple trick for beginners
With some fonts (especially those fixed width fonts in code editors) a "l" (small "L") looks exactly the same as a "1" (a one), which makes sure that the guy maintaining the code will have fun a-plenty.
For ease of writing such horrid code, I recommend the Bistream Vera Sans Mono typeface. All those characters can be distinguished from each other, and there are bold, italic and bold-italic variants for your syntax highlighting needs. Just because you want to confuse and antagonise your fellow cow-orkers doesn't mean you have to suffer yourself!
Download 'em here... :-) -
Please learn how to make links.Please learn how to make links.
<a href=" http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/font
(without any spaces put there by Slashdot) yields: Bitstream Vera fonts.s /vera/">Bitstream Vera fonts.</a> -
Re:Looks nice but no anti-aliasing?
Because they're really hard to do. Seriously, the guy who designed Tahoma was paid quite well for it. Further, Mocrosoft tweaked their font-rendering code (not sure what parts, or maybe it was the TTF file itself...) to get the glifs looking exactly as the font-designer wanted them to.
That being said, there is a family of fonts included with Gnome that absolutely love. I even copied them over to my Window's box [gasp!]. (I think it's the bitstream vera fonts, but I'm not certain cause I'm at work.)
BTW, if you like Tahoma, Verdena is considered better on many fronts and is basically a wider variety of Tahoma. -
Re:Interesting...Columns of figures will still line up nicely, because almost all post-digital fonts (including Times Roman, one of the core 13 fonts in the first PostScript printers) use tabular figures - where the digits are all the same width.
However, as a consequence, the spacing all figures in non-tabular setting (that is, in run-on text - which is most setting) looks worse. As a typographer I spend time nearly every day manually fixing bad spacing caused by this unfortunate decision by the PostScript architects at Adobe - perhaps Warnock himself.
Other early digital font blunders by Adobe, mostly uncorrected, include:
- poor quality digitisations;
- short font families (missing weights);
- incomplete glyph sets (e.g. lacking ligatures, small caps, non-lining figures);
- bizarre glyph substitutions (e.g. Adobe Univers ampersand);
- distorted, misshapen and badly weighted glyphs (Adobe Futura);
- inadequate or incorrect kerning pairs;
- etc.
The Bitstream type library avoids many of these problems, and I strongly recommend it over Adobe's if you care about quality type.
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Re:Its a shame..
They should have used an open license font like Bitstream Vera. This would have given them the fixed spaced "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" for tabular data, "Bitstream Vera Serif" for paragraph and "Bitstream Vera Sans" for headers, captions, etc. Simply beautiful and open.
Ahh, simply beautiful and open... But are typography copyrightable? They sure seem to be free most of the time. Let's see here: :)In the United States, font design is not copyrightable, but it is patentable if novel enough. Stone and Lucida are the only two patented typefaces, and this may not hold up in court.
So what's the big deal with the copyright notice at the bottom of BitStream Vera's page?Europe used to have the same "can't copyright typefaces" laws as the United States, but Germany (in 1981) and the UK (in 1989) have passed laws making typeface designs copyrightable. The UK law is even retroactive (!), so designs produced before 1989 are also copyrighted, if the copyrights wouldn't have already expired (the German one is not retroactive).
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Its a shame..
They should have used an open license font like Bitstream Vera. This would have given them the fixed spaced "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" for tabular data, "Bitstream Vera Serif" for paragraph and "Bitstream Vera Sans" for headers, captions, etc. Simply beautiful and open.
:) -
Re:Fonts
I'm pretty sure that's the Bitstream Vera Sans. Very nice fonts, if you haven't seen them yet:
check them out. -
Maybe My Opinion�s a Little Slanted�but
From the Bitstream website:
Font Previews for Bitstream Vera
From the various articles, it is said that 10 fonts will be donated in total. That seems to match.
But...what if I suddenly want to type in Serif Oblique? Umm...anyone?
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Re:I'm obviously retarded
Yeah you're retarded
:)
Here's a link. -
Re:heres some images of vera
And clickable. You know, it's not _that_ hard, and it helps a lot - particularly with these long links that introduce spaces in plain text...
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Re:Fonts?
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Re:Fonts?
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Re:Vera, what do you look like?
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Re:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts)OK, so I just checked out the "Prima" fonts on which these Vera fonts will be based (and you can do with a testdrive of the Prima fonts at Bitstream.
Not surprisingly, the kerning is much better. A bit surprisingly, the kerning of pairs involving "e" in Prima Serif is still not what you might expect. Tastes vary, but a "Ve" pair (as in Vera, the font name) should be fairly tight, and the serifs are such that "er" needs to be tighter as well. As displayed on the Bitstream page, Prima Serif (=Vera Serif) is indeed a pretty tight font (with an x-height such that it even looks a bit condensed) so you notice these things.
That said, I think I do want to be a lone with Vera Mono Sans and her slinky oblique and bold sisters.
:-) -
Re:one big, happy family
According to the Bitstream page for Vera, the ten fonts are Vera Sans, Vera Sans Oblique, Vera Sans Bold, Vera Sans Bold Oblique, Vera Sans Mono, Vera Sans Mono Oblique, Vera Sans Mono Bold, Vera Sans Mono Bold Oblique, Vera Serif and Vera Serif Bold.
It appears that none of the Vera family have italic versions, just obliques (and there is a difference between italic and oblique), and the Vera Serif family doesn't have Oblique forms.
I would love to have a Vera Serif Italic and Vera Serif Italic Bold to go with the rest of the family, but I'm not the one paying Bitstream to do this. -
Re:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts)
Following up myself: go to Bitstream's catalogue, where you can select a font and "testdrive" it. This renders your text. The kerning there is fine.
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Re:Obvious question
From the press release: "The Bitstream Vera fonts will be available for free copying and redistribution and can be modified as long as the font name is changed."
I tried to look in the Bitstream store's find fonts section, but it was slow as molasses. I'm sure it't been indirectly Slashdotted. If you're lucky enough to get in, they should have sample images of the fonts. -
Such a giving company!
First the Free T-Shirts, Now free fonts! I hope to see more companies get our interest by doing something good for the community than evil --**cough**Microsoft**cough**!
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Also check out Thunderhawk!Look at this on Bitstream's site. It's a full-featured PDA web browser that supports landscape mode.
Kaching! Finally something decent looking for PocketPC users who're sick of the joke that's portable IE!
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For PDA's, Bitstream did that & did it better.
Bitstream's Thunderhawk is a Mozilla-based browser which one-ups Opera by using a server-based compression algorithm to speed the downloading of pages by a factor of 3, usually more. Not only is the display slick and very fast, but combined with the compression, you're saving money by using less bandwidth at the same time you download the page in less time.
It's been available publicly for 6 months, and was fairly widespread in beta for the same period of time before its official release.
Granted, it only runs on Pocket PC right now, but that's because the proprietary font which makes the small text so readable requires a sufficiently sharp display. They're beta testing a version to run on the Clie now, and other clients are coming as well.
I posted to /. when Thunderhawk was publicly released, but didn't make the frontpage. (It's a great program that I thought deserved some press.) How come Opera has enough celebrity power to make it to the top, but Thunderhawk and other similar products don't? -
Similar but I better idea I think...
Bitstream do something similar for PDA's with a product called ThunderHawk. Instead of reformating the page as such what they do is use a custom font that is much more readable on a pda sized device and resize the images on the fly.
Most PDA's at the moment use a 320x240 screen resolution, using ThunderHawk gives you a 640x480 view of a webpage but still using the 320x240 pda screen. Works really well. -
Re:Arial Unicode MS Equally ImportantAnswering my own question...
Using the Wayback machine trick outlined above, I was able to get a copy of the original ariuni
.exe file. Below is the EULA, which is written as a supplement to that of applicable software. The definition of the latter includes "Microsoft Office" (no version specified), whereas the MS website now stipulates that the font is for Publisher 2000 users only.Thus, to expand on my comments above, there is an even more dire need for a OS'd and free prorportional TrueType (or better) font with as broad a unicode coverage as possible. The only alternative I know of is Cyberbit; Bitstream's website says it is now a commerical font, but you can download it from netscape's ftp site.
Arial Unicode MS EULA excerpt follows:
SUPPLEMENTAL END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR MICROSOFT SOFTWARE ("SUPPLEMENTAL EULA") (c) 2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. IMPORTANT: READ CAREFULLY - These Microsoft software product components, including any "online" or electronic documentation ("Components") are subject to the terms and conditions of the agreement under which you have licensed the applicable Microsoft product ("Product") described below (each an "End User License Agreement" or "EULA") and the terms and conditions of this Supplemental EULA.
.... NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID EULA FOR ANY "PRODUCT" (I.E., MICROSOFT OFFICE, MICROSOFT PUBLISHER, AND ANY MICROSOFT PRODUCTS THAT INCLUDE MICROSOFT PUBLISHER AS A COMPONENT PRODUCT), YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY OR OTHERWISE USE THE COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA. -
Re:Linux bugsWell, truetype hinting nowadays isn't that expensive it used to be. Go to bitstream and see yourself...
Anyway, the URW fonts distributed for last two or so years are pretty decent. I don't even use Arial anymore, Nimbus Sans does it's job well.
In addition, XFree86 4.2.0 contains Luxi fonts. They are also very good.
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Re:What's the big deal?
Well, just because it's okay for you don't mean its okay for everyone. Some people are just more sensitive to things than others. I think that AA fonts (good implementations, at least) look noticibly better than non-AA ones.
For a great implementation of AA fonts, check out QNX's RtP. The Font Fusion powered Photon has the most god-damn gorgeous fonts in the entire universe. Download RtP just to take an eyeful of the fonts! -
Some of the "Monumental Failure" theory can't holdThe notion that Mozilla is a massive waste of "open source resources" is decidedly silly; consider:
What other open source project would you expect Netscape Communications Corp (or AOL) to be involved with?
The fact that it has taken a whopping long time for the (marginally usable) M10 release to arrive is not a clear example of failure; the project has had to labour under several significant constraints:
- In order to release Mozilla as Open Source(tm), Netscape had to tear out a whole lot of code that they didn't own. Java, VisiBroker, RSA stuff, ObjectStore, TrueDoc, Full Circle Talkback, Inso Proofreader, and others.
This left gaping holes in the source code tree, things that had to be reimplemented.
- Mozilla has essentially been rearchitected.
What with the above gaping holes, and other things that had grown into being ill-designed, it made huge sense to rebuild a whole lot of the functionality from scratch.
If a version that is of "production quality" is released in the next 4 months, which is not inconceivable, that essentially means that Mozilla has been recreated in two years, which is certainly not a monumental failure.
- In order to release Mozilla as Open Source(tm), Netscape had to tear out a whole lot of code that they didn't own. Java, VisiBroker, RSA stuff, ObjectStore, TrueDoc, Full Circle Talkback, Inso Proofreader, and others.