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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.

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.

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.

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.

While you're at it, maybe you can also convince these people to put their damned fonts in the public domain?

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

Bitstream Vera available at: http://www.bitstream.com/font_rendering/products/d ev_fonts/vera.html/

"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."

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... :-)

<a href=" http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fonts /vera/">Bitstream Vera fonts.</a>

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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).

--Wikipedia

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. :)

I'm pretty sure that's the Bitstream Vera Sans. Very nice fonts, if you haven't seen them yet:
check them out.

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?

Yeah you're retarded :)
Here's a link.

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...

It looks to me like they're using the lovely Vera Sans that Bitstream very graciously provided as open source. These fonts alone have a huge impact on the visual quality, not just the freetype issues.

It looks to me like they're using the lovely Vera Sans that Bitstream very graciously provided as open source. These fonts alone have a huge impact on the visual quality, not just the freetype issues.

http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fonts /vera/index.html

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. :-)

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.

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.

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.

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**!

Kaching! Finally something decent looking for PocketPC users who're sick of the joke that's portable IE!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.