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https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/... To bad they do not show the font in the article.

Here is the actual link:

WhatTheFont

Sony's word mark is Clarendon. Coby's is Bookman. There's a difference. The serif on the 'C' in Bookman is angled, while the same serif in Clarendon is vertical. Type COBY != SONY into Bookman and Clarendon to see the difference.

Sony's word mark is Clarendon. Coby's is Bookman. There's a difference. The serif on the 'C' in Bookman is angled, while the same serif in Clarendon is vertical. Type COBY != SONY into Bookman and Clarendon to see the difference.

It appears to be an edited rip of Aakash Soneri's Sone. (A comparison: Sone is teal, the new logo face is wine, where it overlaps is cobalt blue.) The changes appear to be as insubstantial as adding a slant to ascenders and shifting the baselines of some of the glyphs.

If Canonical modified Sone, didn't license it, and they start freely distributing it ("our global community will still maintain access to the resources needed to construct logos that use the branding" - so either the modified glyphs for the logo as svg, or the modified font itself), that's a dick move.

And if they did license it, then why is an open-source project licensing commercial fonts and calling it a reflection of the project?

Maybe it's a placeholder - who knows? Canonical doesn't say anything about the font's origin or license in the linked documentation, nor does Canonical's Jono Bacon in his nearly identical announcement.

But it is disappointing to see an open source project - whose community already made LGPL-licensed typefaces for their current logo - make and publicize such a half-assed effort, even in a preliminary stage, without any explanation on the decision.

When you say, as an organization based on community contribution:

"We wanted Ubuntu to reflect the precision and engineering that sits at the heart of the product. The new logo reflects this but not at the expense of the immediately recognisable circle of friends."

And you follow that with a logo that's based on a commercial typeface, you're reneging on that intent in at least one of two ways:

• You're disrespecting the designer of the commercial font by modifying it and refusing to give credit - if it's licensed correctly at all;
• You're disrespecting the open-source community, which includes professional designers who've went to bat for you in the past.

Even if Sone was correctly licensed, and Canonical got permission to modify it for their logo and future redistribution, why not get it from the community?

And if it wasn't licensed correctly, then is Ubuntu following the lead of Arial and just ripping things off in a legal but unethical manner when they can't find what they want in a convenient license?

(And maybe it's a coincidence - a really bad coincidence that still should be fixed. Without any explanation, nobody can tell.)

the signature? what font is that in?

That would appear to be Bitstream's English 111 Vivace.

RTFA and then look at the printable semacode. In addition to the code there is a text description of where it is sending you. Problem solved.

That doesn't solve much : you still need to update every packaging out there to implement semacode. I think it would be a lot more useful to use the techology to recognize already existing packaging,

Furthermore, cheap low pixel digital cameras will never be good enough to recognize text characters (think about localization) but they can recognize whether a pixel is black or white.

Semacode has a higher information density than a letter, I can't see why it would be simpler to recognize.

And cameras don't have to be powerful to do that. You could take a photo, upload it to a 'recognizer' site, like WhatTheFont, and get back the results as an html page.

This is a great idea, if only /.'s could try to be helpful and post ideas instead of looking at every new concept as a way for some corporation to take our money.

Like I said, I think the technology is cool, but its application is not.

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.

I have seen much better C/R image systems, e-gold.com although only black and white seems harder to crack via OCR, and one, I don't have the URL for it, but it was great - letters were sized, distorted, streched, oriented in different directions, random colored blobs were on the image, etc. These systems haven't begun to explore the realm of creatively damaged fonts that are available, like:
corrupt
or
punk-ass
there are a wide variety of creative ways to make fonts hard to read for OCR but still recognizable to humans.

I have seen much better C/R image systems, e-gold.com although only black and white seems harder to crack via OCR, and one, I don't have the URL for it, but it was great - letters were sized, distorted, streched, oriented in different directions, random colored blobs were on the image, etc. These systems haven't begun to explore the realm of creatively damaged fonts that are available, like:
corrupt
or
punk-ass
there are a wide variety of creative ways to make fonts hard to read for OCR but still recognizable to humans.

I would agree with the Nokia typographer, who--I assume--is in the business of making type look good on cell phone screens, that Verdana and other sans-serifed fonts are easier to use and view on non-paper, i.e. computer screens and cell phone screens.

I think the main difference is one of resolution: Paper has a huge advantage in resolution...2400dpi on a well-coated, high-quality sheet. Compared to a 72- or 96-dpi screen, paper can use subtle things like serifs to make reading easier to the average reader. With screen resolutions, you have to make letterforms do more with less...serifs are often the first thing to go in the name of legibility.

Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style is a great introduction to all of this.

Interestingly enough, Times New Roman was first used in the Times of London and probably drawn by Brits Victor Lardent and Stanley Morison, so its origins are decidedly non-American. However, there's been evidence unearthed that Times New Roman was actually originally drawn by American yacht designer Starling Burgess.

Interestingly enough, Times New Roman was first used in the Times of London and probably drawn by Brits Victor Lardent and Stanley Morison, so its origins are decidedly non-American. However, there's been evidence unearthed that Times New Roman was actually originally drawn by American yacht designer Starling Burgess.

Interestingly enough, Times New Roman was first used in the Times of London and probably drawn by Brits Victor Lardent and Stanley Morison, so its origins are decidedly non-American. However, there's been evidence unearthed that Times New Roman was actually originally drawn by American yacht designer Starling Burgess.

What I found interesting was that they're not using the Chicago 12 font on the iPod mini, like they do on the original iPod, but rather Espy Sans 10 Bold, one that most of us haven't seen since OS 9 and the Newton. I personally think it looks more stylish, but they probably chose it because it's a slightly denser and shorter font that would fit better on the smaller screen (compare the screenshots on the iPod and iPod mini).

From the photo on the Yahoo story, it looks suspiciously like Chicago, the Apple system font of yore. Even Dell wouldn't be that blatant, would they?

I think it's really hard to do elvish type right with standard TrueType fonts.

Elvish fonts cry out for Apple Advanced Typography fonts. For instance, these characters are way too vertical and constrained horizontally. It ought to look more like this, with all the decenders flowing under previous characters (a right-handed elf, I guess).

Check out the Q here for an example of this or the Zapfino font. The example doesn't even have all the features turned on. I recently did some birth announcements using Zapfino on Mac OS X and the type is phenominally nice. For instance if a sentence ends with the word 'example.', the cursive tail of the trailing e, which is quite long, goes under the period, actually extending past the period. It looks nearly hand-crafted.

I understand making an AAT font is an incredibly laborious process, but fortunately there doesn't seem to be a lack of Tolkien-obsessed geeks (in the nicest possible connotation).

Coliseo is actually a knockoff of Koloss. See also Nick Curtis' version called Phat Phreddy.

I can see you now, sitting next to Captain Furious in the sequel to Mystery Men...Ben Stiller yelling his ars off while you comment on the preety font the arch villain has on his cape. LOL

Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.

Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.

That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.

Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.

Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.

That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.

Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.

Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.

That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.

Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.

Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.

That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.

Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.

Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.

That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.

Of losing all ability to communicate with my Euro-traveling boyfriend and PC user ("Look: It's me or that Mac!").

Last I checked, there's MSN Messenger for Mac, several different email clients, and I can print to my HP printer just by plugging it in - didn't even need to install a driver. Did it ever occur to you that your boyfriend is a control freak (or he's trying to find an excuse to dump you)?

Of being exiled into the lonely desert of incompatible files, botched PowerPoint presentations, and gobbledy-gook attachments...

Blame the MacBU. They make PowerPoint for Mac, not Apple.

I'm nostalgic for my dear (not so floppy) floppies, poor things,

My USB floppy drive is recognized in moments. I doubt the PC would be any faster with a USB drive.

Suddenly, Disk Utility has become the most important feature on my desktop

Repeat after me - I can buy Mac-formatted floppies instead of using Disk Utility

Tempus Sans font and always forces me to use this darn Helvetica.

If it's so damned important for you to have Tempus Sans, then buy the font.

Switched in July 2001, and never going back.

Two words: Matthew Carter. He's the guy who designed Verdana and Georgia for MicroSoft (plus a bunch of other fonts before that). He was also one of the founders of Bitstream. IMO Verdana, Georgia and Andale are superior as screen fonts to anything else. Although my favourite sans font is Franklin Gothic.

XFree86 can display pretty much any font. The problem is getting the font -- there aren't many free high quality fonts around. Most fonts are pretty expensive (few normal people will pay $20+ for a font); MicroSoft's webfonts were gratis.

Two words: Matthew Carter. He's the guy who designed Verdana and Georgia for MicroSoft (plus a bunch of other fonts before that). He was also one of the founders of Bitstream. IMO Verdana, Georgia and Andale are superior as screen fonts to anything else. Although my favourite sans font is Franklin Gothic.

XFree86 can display pretty much any font. The problem is getting the font -- there aren't many free high quality fonts around. Most fonts are pretty expensive (few normal people will pay $20+ for a font); MicroSoft's webfonts were gratis.

Amazingly enough, the receptionist knew right off the bat. Helvetica.

I don't know if Michigan road signs are different (never been), but in the rest of the US it's not Helvetica that's used. The Federal Highway Administration has its own set of typefaces that aren't really all that similar to Helvetica.

Knock-offs of the most common US highway typeface are available here. For me it's a lot more readable and a lot more attractive than Helvetica.

Yes, I'm another font obsessive. When I'm not looking after their network, I'm a designer for a sign company, so I guess it's my job to know these things.

As for Knuth (trying to get back on topic here), he's done an awful lot for both computer science as a whole and for digital typesetting, but what on earth was he on when he designed Computer Modern Roman? Ok, it's instantly recognizable, but it's also butt ugly and not very readable even on paper (too spidery, it would be a lot better if the horizontal stem widths were wider). On a low-res computer screen, it's a typeface disaster.

I wasted a few hours the other day pushing the limits of What The Font, an automated type recognition engine. While it is better than my untrained eye, it still only hit around 50% on the samples I submitted.