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Scalable-Font Tools?

Posted by Cliff on from the sansing-those-serifs dept.

DarkVein writes "My question is twofold. First, with the introduction of WebFonts from W3C, are there any projects underway to develop a real Web Font format, or are Type1 and Truetype thought to be sufficient? Secondly, I seem to be at a loss to find any decent and open font creation tools, especially ones capable of Unicode. The best I've found is GETO which seems to have been abandoned about a year and a half ago, without notice. I've had a long standing desire to get my feet wet designing one or two decent Unicode fonts, but most of the options seem to only be available for MacOS9, Win32 and require far higher prices."

3 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. PfaEdit by raulmazda · · Score: 5, Informative
    You may want to check out PfaEdit which is in active development.

    Also along the font lines, there's also the Free Font Foundation which has some links to other font editors. Though it says that PfaEdit is "our only hope" so there's probably not anything else all that great to check out ;)

  2. MS core fonts are free for noncommercial use by coyote-san · · Score: 3, Informative
    I hate to throw the harsh light of reality on your beliefs, but if you go to the FontPack web page and click on the FAQ link, you'll see that Microsoft explicitly states

    • Anyone can download and install these fonts for their own use
    • Designers can specify the fonts within their Web pages

    That's black letter contract. NOBODY is ripping off Microsoft when they download the fonts from the Microsoft site for personal use. Copying them from a Windows box is a little grey, but as long as it's for personal use it doesn't violate the spirit of the license.

    Unfortunately, the license does not include the right to redistribute the fonts. So a Linux distro that included the fonts would probably be in violation of this license, while a distro that provided an installer script would be fine.

    --
    For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
    1. Re:MS core fonts are free for noncommercial use by smcv · · Score: 2, Informative

      while a distro that provided an installer script would be fine. Indeed, Debian does precisely that as part of its 'contrib' archive. (As do other distros, probably)