Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Typography Withdraws Free Web Fonts
jonadab writes: "Microsoft Typography has for years provided a set of very nice
True-Type fonts for free-as-in-without-monetary-cost, including
the excellent Andale Mono (the only scalable fixed-width font
I really like). They are gone. Here
is the Microsoft page where they formerly were, which now tersely
explains that they're not available any longer. There is an
article
about this on extremetech. According to the article, Microsoft
says the withdrawal of the fonts at about the same time as the
LinuxWorld is coincidence. The article also references a Debian
package that has been removed from the distro because of this.
If I understand my rumours correctly, it was a package that
downloaded the fonts from MS, displayed their EULA, and allowed
the user to extract and install the fonts. It was possible to
do the same thing using other distros.
Guess it's time for the OSS people to make some decent-looking
scalable both-screen-and-printer fonts (preferably TrueType).
At minimum, we need nice-looking serif proportional (to replace
Verdana), a sans proportional (to replace Georgia), and a
mostly-sans fixed (to replace Andale Mono), all with good
language support.
This should have been done a long time ago, since the MS fonts
were, albeit $0, not licensed in an open fashion. We always
knew we were relying on MS Typography's generosity, and that
these could disappear at any time. But now the need is more
urgent."
This is no good :(. First thing I do with a new SuSE install is fetchmsttfonts.
linux rlz m$ sux lololololol!
micro$haft are bastards for doing this to us!
Having just done a big bunch of font changes
(on my Gentoo machine, Helvetica won't anti-alias, so I had to reconfigure KDE) I noticed the Luxi fonts that aren't from MS, but
they do look pretty nice, and they scale and anti-alias well, could they be used as a base for
more fonts.
I personally would like a replacement for the
Comic-sans MS font (personal preference I know).
Since I've already got the fonts, looks like they're getting burned to CD for future use!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
What open source tools can I use?
"In a statement, a spokesman for Microsoft said that the company withdrew the free fonts for several reasons. "Most users who wanted the fonts have downloaded them already," a company spokesman wrote in an email to ExtremeTech. "They ship with recent OS's - Windows XP and Mac OS (via Internet Explorer). Microsoft has also found that the downloads were being abused - repackaged, modified and shipped with commercial products in violation of the EULA [licensing agreement]."
;) (joking, joking, out down the chair)
So, everyone who already wanted them had downloaded them, they come with XP and OS X, and people were abusing them.--Damned OSS hippies
Didn't know you could determine that everyone who needed them already had them. Interesting. I'd like to see the metric used to determine that.
Sent from your iPad.
was curious how much resources it would take? i always imagined it'd take a lot esp. for multilingual unicode supporting fonts(so many chinese characters too!! not to mention korean characters are also stored one by one not as the korean alphabet) dunno, may be simple, but it seems so daunting to me
The web fonts were released so people can design sites which look sharper and nicer, such as the Verdana font. Others, like Georgia is "bordering on trendiness", as someone else put it.
And yet, Slashdot, the site that posted this news, is still using Times New Roman.. ironic.
What did you expect? "Here are our clearly superior fonts, please use them in your open source project."
You must be quite naive. Hopefully the open-source commnity has learnt from this and will produce some exceent fonts of their own (GPL'd, of course.)
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
"At minimum, we need nice-looking serif proportional (to replace Verdana), a sans proportional (to replace Georgia)..." Verdana is sans, Georgia is serf.
1. GRANT OF LICENSE. This EULA grants you the following rights:
* Installation and Use. You may install and use an unlimited number of
copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT.
* Reproduction and Distribution. You may reproduce and distribute an
unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT; provided that each copy
shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark
notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of this EULA. Copies of the
SOFTWARE PRODUCT may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone
basis or included as part of your own product.
So uhm, looks like I can distribute it without charge. Someone give me a place to stash 1.5M:
-rw-r--r-- 1 jmd jmd 1524606 Dec 7 2000 truetype.tar.gz
The familiar distro (for ARM based PDAs, mostly iPaq's) counted on this heavily I believe, for your handheld.
Anyone want a copy, send an email to littlemanthegeek at yahoo dot com
Pi
...but Georgia is the serif font, and Verdana is the sans serif (the serif being to little line thingies at the top and bottom of the letters).
Anyway, this is bad news indeed - I believe it's aimed squarely at Codeweaver's Crossover programs, making them less usable by removing the possibility of downloading fonts. IANAL, but can't someone just take the original font, change it by a specified amount, and re-release it as a replacement font?
Reminder: find a new sig
This sounds like a typical M$ trick. Take something that is widespread and then break it so that other products don't work with it.
Creating fonts (good ones) is considerably harder than it may seem. The tools to do so are limited and aren't being supported well. An open source tool similar to Fontographer (but with more features and updates) would be welcome. Many private font companies develop their own in house software to create fonts. The really big stumbling block is that most font design is done on the mac and right now there are no font creation tools I know of for mac osx.
PFAEdit is a sophisticated graphical editor for designing and editing Postscript fonts.
MLT - simple and robust open source multimedia framework for Linux
For a while, the fonts were still available here, but I just checked it and it looks like they were taken down from there too.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Or is it adobe property?
linux people won't make/use fonts (or anything else) unless everything about them is free
I found a nice program a couple of days ago.
Try pfaedit. It supports TTF fonts as well as bitmap fonts and has a lot of good features. It supports simple latin-1 fonts as well as unicode fonts and author seems to really know what he's doing since website tells a lot about differences and inner workings of different font types. Pfaedit seems to try its best to convert everything necessary so user doesn't have to worry about them too much.
It is a work in progress but I think good artists can make miracles with it. Website also has good documentation altough I think in-program documentation could be a bit better (just to know where to start). I tried it myself a bit but since I'm no artist..
Website also links to other free font editors but pfaedit seems to be most mature. Most of others only support bitmap fonts.
Well, Linux has always had a problem with nice looking fonts. It doesn't have any.
And who wants to program fonts when they're trying to program something cool? Font making is generally not covered in Computer Science classes.
My suggestion? Pay to have them done by a professional. Bang together a donation page and try to set up a deal with someone who can do the work. If you name the font set after the company and put contact info in there, it's free advertising.
I'm sure they'd offer a discount if you did something like that.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Could it be that people were dumping Windows and Microsoft Office for Linux + CrossOver Office + Microsoft Office.
,or PowerPoint format. CrossOver Office allows Linux to be pretty good (and much more stable) platform than Windows - free of DRM, spyware and the Microsoft tax.
For many people, Microsoft Office is the primary application that they use. It is mandated at the university that I teach at that documents must be distributed in MS Word, Excel
As part of the install, you have (had) the option of downloading TrueType fonts (arial, Times New Roman, et al). This was so a document produced in Microsft Office running under Linux looked the same is it did running under native Windows.
This seems the only reason to download the fonts from M$.
Remember, for every CD you purchase, you give the RIAA that much more power. RIAA = SCO = IP terrorists. Any questio
The Debian community recently became more aware of font licensing issues after one of the developers noticed there are a lot of non-free fonts in main. So I expect there will be some shaking out and reorganizing of non-free fonts anyway.
but Verdana is the sans, and Georgia is the serif.
The loss of Verdana is really sad -- it was the"first" (read: first designed by a famous typographer) font ever designed specifically for the screen instead of adapated from print media and was commissioned by MS from Matthew Carter. More info, straight from the horse's mouth.
My favorite Carter font is Walker, the mix 'n' match typeface that he designed for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Totally brilliant.
Erik Dalén
...and now they're taking it away! I teach web development and design, and I've referred my students to this page for a couple of years now so that they can see the fonts they can count on most people having on their machines. These MS fonts were, for a time, installed with every MS OS, every copy of Office (Mac and PC) and every copy of Explorer (mac and PC) which is an alarming percentage of machines.
I used to joke that the monopoly was a good thing in this case because it drops these fonts everywhere and somewhat standardizes the font choice for web developers. I don't wanna contemplate a world without Verdana.
Thank god at least I've been using central CSS, so I only have to change one or two lines per site if the fonts need to be changed!
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
Any version from 3.0 onwards will have 600+ excellent quality TrueType and .pfb fonts, and you will pay about $10 fair and square for them.
How come that using the same fonts (MS fonts) in Xfree without anti aliasing looks far worse than disabling anti aliasing in windows?
In fact windows 95 did not even have AA by default it wa spart of the plus pack and fonts were always perfectly acceptable? Is there some config related trick to sorting this out?
In most engineering projects, especially any for govt. or military, one is not allowed to use any product or material which is only available from a single-source. Obviously, some exceptions can't be helped, but generally it's adhered to, and for the very reasons you (we) experience with this MS font and other similar situations.
So now you know why monopolies are a bad thing.
Unlike other things, free fonts that look good on a display are almost impossible to create. They simply will not look nearly as good as the Microsoft fonts.
Typefaces are one of the most difficult things to create: you have to have hundreds of glyphs that have to look consistent, proportional, and pleasing to the eye. You have to get the spacing exactly right, or it will look horrible.
Low-resolution scalable display fonts (like the Microsoft ones) are even more difficult to create. When you have a monitor running at 75 or 100 dpi, you cannot automatically scale vector fonts and have them look good. That's why most type1 fonts look like sh*t on a display even though they were professionally made. Scaling only works on high-resolution output devices: typesetting machines have several thousands dpi of resolution, while monitors have 75 - 100 dpi. The Monotype (the company that made fonts for M$) fonts use special programming (ttf bytecode) to provide low-resolution glyphs. Most font editing programs will erase the bytecode, and the font then looks like crap. Try opening Verdana with FontLab, changing a glyph or two, and saving it. It will then look like sh*t.
Anyway, my point is that font design should be left to the professionals. No amateur designer will be able to make something as good as one of the Microsoft/Monotype fonts. If you want to try anyway, the tool to use is FontLab. It is one of the best font editors out there.
opentype overview
-Kevin
Geez, it's amusing how many comments here blast MS on the one hand, then bitch that MS removed its free fonts (that the same critics were using).
It just goes to show how ridiculous Linux advocates really are. Chhhhumpolas!
(Slap) I'm a user (Slap) I'm a developer (Slap) I'm a user (Slap) I'm a developer (Slap) I'm a user and a developer!
If it doesn't render right with the default font (or any reasonable font selected by the user), it's broken.
Relying on specific fonts for pages to render correctly is just asking for breakage -- and the FONT tag is deprecated, anyhow.
Unless you could convince someone it was a satire :-)
Redistribution is OK as long as it is not for profit. This means that someone completely unaffiliated with any arguably profit-making venture that might use the fonts could set up a server and all the installers could point to that. I suppose a non-profit could be set up and run on donations.
But that would require time and resources better spent hiring a typographer to make some good free fonts.
Serifs are the little lines at the edges of letters. Georgia is a serifed font, Verdana is a sans-serif font. (sans=without)
Why, exactly, does this matter? Personally, I care not a whit what font I read or write in, so long as it is legible. Is there a large group of people who care about this stuff? Should I be choosing my own fonts for school papers with more care, or is this just some sort of pro/semi-pro publishing thing, that Joe Term Paper need not bother with?
I'm the stranger...posting to
The default fonts in that package, and the fonts that come with Microsoft proucts, are actually knockoffs of the fonts that came with the original PostScript package.
Is directed solely at Linux users?
Laws are for people with no friends.
1. "Open source software is great because it's designed *by* engineers *for* engineers to itch a scratch. So it's free of the corrupting influence of all the idiots you have to deal with in corporate programming: marketing types pandering to users, graphic designers adding useless frills, usability people trying to dumb it down, and technical writers getting things wrong."
2. "Why are there no open source fonts? Where can I get free icons? This online help is useless! Why don't non-programmers like Linux?"
I know I'm wildly over-generalizing. But read Slashdot comments sometime with an eye toward how "creatives" are regarded by the open source community.
-- snip -- ...we need nice-looking serif proportional (to replace Verdana), a sans proportional (to replace Georgia), and a mostly-sans fixed (to replace Andale Mono)...
-- snip --
A Serif is that pointy thing hanging off of the letters in fonts like 'Times'. Times is a serif font, VERDANA is a sans-serif font, GEORGIA is a serif font. You've got it backwards.
These fonts are still available from the Corefonts project. This is perfectly legal and in accordance with the EULA; see the copy of Microsoft's FAQ. The project also includes "a source rpm that can be used to easily create a binary rpm package that, when installed, gives access to Microsoft's TrueType core fonts for the Web."
I quess, I am the only one, but I don't really understand how someone can "own" a fucking font. To me, this is even more bizarre than the case with mindless patents - even the Amazon.com one. But a font, it's ridiculous. Where does this originate from - history anyone? To me this has been for around 15 years one of the biggest mysteries in computing.
You can also specify fonts using CSS which is not deprecated.
You can still download the fonts here
M$
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I believe that typefaces, for all practical effect, were not and are not copyrightable. The digital files (as a publication) and the names (as trademarks) can be protected, but take a tool akin to Fontographer, build a font that has all the advantages of a typeface you like (but with small variations), use an unrestricted name and there you are. As an example, Corel, IIRC, in the mid-90s, distributed a font called Ottawa that was a knock-off of Hermann Zapf's Optima.
This raises ethical questions -- and my sympathies are with the designers, like Zapf, who have been knocked-off. Where I'm a hypocrite is that if a Client (I was with an architectural firm then) had signage that used Optima, we'd use Ottawa for the comps and cad plans rather than buying an Optima package. If I've overlooked something with regards to copyright law regarding typefaces, I'll appreciate all corrections. And if my limited understanding of copyrights means the prior advice is against the law, then by all means, don't do it. As another thread asked, are there free software tools for font design, it can be a fun hobby.
I just look at the pictures.
This is the end of Linux on the Desktop!
Without the good and free truetype fonts provided by Microsoft, there is no hope for linux on the desktop.
It is just too hard on the eyes.
This was covered by OSNews in this article as well as this one a few days ago. The EULA on these fonts allow redistribution of them in unmodified form, so they can be downloaded from http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/. The important thing to learn however is that Linux should stop relying on Microsoft for TrueType fonts.
-- André Dahlqvist
Have you heard of decaf?
Oh...and I use BSD, not Linux. And I'm no hippie. If you want to talk about folks being self-reliant, let's talk about where M$ got their TCP/IP stack from.
...because a decent font doesn't just consist of a few dozen signs. There are all the characters that Unicode consists of. Then you have make ligations (not sure whether they're called that in English) like "Ti" and a lot of other special cases to make your font look good.
It's an extremely difficult task to make good fonts. I thinks someone like IBM would have to spend a few hundred thousand of and $ to make this happen for the OS community.
It is hard to read what M$ intends to do by removing free TT fonts from public download, but I cannot see it as a good thing. Basically, M$ is creating a condition in which browsers running on *nix may not (at some point) be able to render Verdana, which is probably one of the most common fonts on the Web. If Verdana is not installed on (say) a Linux PC, all its browsers (Mozilla, Konquerer) will need to degrade to another alternative non-serif font, unless Verdana can be installed in some way or licensed for distribution with Linux distros.
Keep in mind that M$ commissioned one of the great designers (Matthew Carter,of Bitstream, now of the firm Carter and Cone) to design these TT fonts for onscreen legibility. It will not be easy to replace them (Verdana in particular) with another freely-available font.
However, the OSS community is is dire need of a set of fonts that compete with those available on the M$ platforms, both for on screen use and for printing, especially if it hopes to expand onto the office desktop.
Suggestion to the OSS community: have the emerging alliances between the various distros (e.g.,LSB) create a shared fund, used to commission someone to design a serif and non-serif font for general use on all platforms (including Linux). The goal should be to create a font as good or better than the ones that Matthew Carter designed. And give Matthew Carter first dibs on trying to best himself, thereby ensuring that whatever succeeds Verdana will be of the same style and eloquence as Verdana itself.
In the meantime, (and this may be flamebait) distros may wish pay the evil empire to license Verdana and Georgia for distribution with Linux.
Creating clear, scalable, attractive fonts is neither easy nor cheap -- and the people who care about and need quality fonts are users, not programmers. Given that free software is driven by the needs of technocrats and not by the desires of users, there is little likelihood that high-quality "free" fonts will emerge.
The technocrats argue that "making fonts can't be that hard" and "just whip some out in the Gimp", betraying their ignorance. Technocrats won't stand for a non-programmer making such "it's easy" comments about writing a complex application, but they hypocritically think they are so wise as to belittle the complexities of designing quality fonts (or user interfaces, or whatever else isn't considered "elite" enough for their full understanding).
Microsoft is not stupid; it has identified weakenesses in free software, and is exploiting one (the lack of fonts) to its advantage. People in graphic arts or publishing have no interest in free software because it, quite frankly, does not care about them.
The Mac, which has excellent font support, proves that this is not an issue of free-versus-Microsoft or Unix-versus-Windows; clearly, the Unix-based OS/X provides the kind of font support that users need. The reason for good fonts on the Mac is motivation: Apple cares about meeting the needs of graphic artists and publishers.
The downfall of free software is its elitist and myopic attitude. Microsoft knows this, and can use its power to provide the "niceties" (like quality fonts) that free developers ignore.
All about me
Linux needs a quality font package. Donald Knuth's work on comuter typography, which is comprehensive (7 volumes) should be the starting point for any open source typography effort. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, or to deal with Adobe or Micro$oft.
This guy is a retard.
Yes, CSS is good stuff. Let me rephrase: A web page that needs to specify fonts to look decent is broken.
>According to the article, Microsoft says the withdrawal of the fonts .NET or Mono is either an utter fool or an Microsoft stooge.
>at about the same time as the LinuxWorld is coincidence.
>
Coincidence my ass. This only proves that anyone who says that the Open Source/Free Software Community should support/adopt C# or anything related to
well since you're using BSD, not linux, then obviously i'm not talking to you, you dumb fuck.
you're not a hippie? good on ya! go show it to the world and be proud!
let's talk about where M$ got their TCP/IP stack from.
the difference is MS never claimed to be self-reliant, so they have nothing to live up to in that aspect.
that is far from the typical linux zealot/hippie/asshat, who gets all hyped up about how he can compile his own kernel(!) and doesn't have to rely on commercial software.
learn to read, spankyboy.
Andale mono DOES NOT come with XP.
"Guess it's time for the OSS people to make some decent-looking scalable both-screen-and-printer fonts (preferably TrueType). At minimum, we need nice-looking serif proportional (to replace Verdana), a sans proportional (to replace Georgia), and a mostly-sans fixed (to replace Andale Mono), all with good language support."
Verdana is a sans-serif font, Georgia is a serif font and Andale Mono is a fixed-width font based on a sans-serif typeface, there are no mostly-sans font types. Fixed-width fonts mean the spacing between characters is equal. These fonts were designed for use on terminals but are not very good modern on-screen fonts as many of the parameters the fixed-width fonts were designed to solve are no longer an issue. Fixed-width fonts have NEVER been good for print.
..and its shitty fonts have been the bane of Linux existence since I can remember. RedHat and the other distros should have fired them a long time ago.
There are tons of free fonts here.
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
Both of these companies are "committed" to Linux o the desktop yet both of them seem utterly clueless when it comes to fonts.
I have installed an RH 7.3 box w/ Ximian desktop, and for God's sake I can't even read the articles on CNN.com without zooming in at least 2 times! I had the same problem w/ Linux.com but Roblimo came to the rescue and changed the style sheet, as I understand. My email client (Evolution) cannot display HTML emails written with these MS fonts, either.
On the default installation, fonts should be extremely legible. I'm sure companies like Redhat, Ximian, KDE, Sun and Mandrake have the clout and the cash to design the 3 most basic fonts that we need.
I'm not saying that Linux should be able to please the most finicky designers, but a regular person won't think twice about Linux if he/she can't read the first web site they go to.
because you fucktards can't even be self-reliant and make your own damn fonts
So, why don't you tell us what fonts you have made?
I've never had any problems reading text using either the default8x16 or default8x9 font, especially not since I got my 19"...
its not the font that's "owned", its the effort that went into making it, you dumb fuck
.45
why don't you quit bitching and go design your own font like the good little unwashed linux hippie you are?
i'll show you some history, dude. just bend over and take it like a man and i promise i won't blow open your head with my
to act like more of a snob, it would be nearly impossible.
Everyone needs to start somewhere.
Your elitist attitude only serves to drive away new users to the Linux community.
I guess we should be bracing ourselves for new Microsoft fonts which aren't open for just anybody to use...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Like coding, the code is owned by programmer and by the license. Fonts usually don't follow the GNU. They were designed by someone and that someone can choose to license it however they want. Nothing is free. It is not mindless as you say. It is more analagous to a design. For example, who owns the Coco Cola logo?? The company of course. Someone designed it and the design is copyrighted very much like fonts. Someone design a typeface, it is protected as art.
European countries vary, but you can copyright designs in Germany and England.
The problem is that so many typefaces are derivatives of one or more other typefaces.
Since the lack of protection of typefaces has still allowed many good typefaces to be designed, I would argue that they don't need copyright or patent protection. Unfortunately the same doesn't appear to be true of human typesetters - it seems like many print publications choose horrible fonts! OTOH some textbooks really use modern layout techniques well.
Anyone remember the good old days of Wired when they used radical page design? It was cool, if unreadable at times.
-Kevin
True, it's shitty that they withdrew the fonts, but I can't see any practical advantage to the purposely removing them on Linux day. Believe it or not, it probably is just coincidence. And at the risk of sounding like I'm siding with MS, few popular services on the net remain free for very long. It's not simply limited to MS, but here, I guess the fact that it is MS somehow makes it newsworthy.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
NONE!
and you know why?? COS I NEVER CLAIMED I COULD!!
unlike all you FUCKING LINUX HIPPIES, i don't get all smug about how cool it is to compile a kernel and how self-reliant i am. therefore, i don't have to prove anything to you.
its just so hilarious watching a bunch of fucking linux hippies get all upset cos MS, their collective evil arch-nemesis stopped providing a free font for download.
get a life, fucktard.
oh, and learn to read too, maxxy. asking someone to prove a point they never made is fucking dumb.
No one would argue that a photographer has the rights to a photograph he took, even if the subject of the photograph is public domain. What reasoning do you have that a font is so different from any other peice of software or device that someone concieved, worked on and wants to garner money from? Copyright isn't always a bad thing.
There are more important reasons for choosing a typeface than style, like usability.
Times New Roman is a serif typeface. Serif typefaces are easier to read on paper because of the subtle detail such as thick and thin lines, hooks and feet. On a computer screen with a much lower resolution than paper the subtleties of serifs degrade and san serifs can be easier on the eyes.
Usability studies show that people read san serif typefaces faster on the screen than serifs, the opposite of what happens on paper. That's why standard OS UI elements are nearly always in san serif, and books are nearly always in serif
I can't find any comments from Jakob Nielsen on the subject, but his site uses a san serif typeface.
A fucking font, as you put it, is a piece of ART and takes a lot of time to develop and even more if you want to develop it good. You can fucking go to fucking GM and fucking try to get a fucking car for fucking free and you will see that they will not be amused about that. It's fucking ignorance of people who fucking use "fuck" too often that fucking drives fucking software theft and the fucking likes. If you don't fucking get it that fucking fonts are DEVELOPED by people for quite a time than that's your problem.
Although I've access to a number of fonts, and have actually paid a license for some monotype fonts (which are very nicely done), when it comes to producing papers, etc., with TeX/LaTeX, I still use computer modern (CM). Indeed, even with my PS printer, I use CM, although it has a number of very nice fonts as standard.
Wouldn't it be nice if CM became a standard web font? Nice maths fonts, and everything.
Best wishes,
Bob
This is why im so reluctant to embrace mono and any other projects that have anything to do with Microsoft. Any patent or license will be forced against us if and when any technology gets "too big". I would rather see that OpenSource would try to make its own technologies.
They have a habit of using any means avaliable to crush competition.
HTTP/1.1 400
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The parent post is moronic and uninformed, as are the moderators who modded it up.
Designing fonts is not as difficult as he makes it out to be, and it certainly can be learned - as can anything in life.
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of good artists out there that are more than capable of learning how to design a font who are also familiar with programming.
There are also a few open source font designing utilities.
t1utils is a good Type 1 designing tool.
It is a commandline font compiler/decompiler that uses an ascii file to define the postscript font outlines of each character directly.
If I understand my rumours correctly, it was a [Linux] package that downloaded the fonts from MS, displayed their EULA, and allowed the user to extract and install the fonts.
Ford: "Since Chevy is copying our car styles, we are no longer going to style our cars. They will hereafter be bland."
Table-ized A.I.
I figure MS is going all unicode. The unicode versions of Arial is a whopping 23 megabytes. It covers practically every character and glyph possible. So now, you have one font that can be used for arabic, chinese, thai, european,cryllic, you name it.
I suspect, the unicode versions of the other webfonts are coming out shortly.
And to those who think making fonts is easy is clueless.
Not to be nit-picky, but, Verdanda is a Sans-Serif font. (note the lack of serifs, the pointy bits at the end of characters). Georgia is a Serif face. The reason that both of these faces are so well regarded is that the hinting in them (that is the instructions that tell your OS how to handle scaling up and down a face at screen resolution) is amazingly well done.
amen!
are you reading this spankyboy? huh huh huh????
look spankyboy, i know its been a long, hard and slippery night, but surely you didn't have to rely on a stupid campfire story that linux fucktards tell to each other over a roasting pile of MS windows boxes to prove a point you never had, now did you?
tsk tsk.
spankyboy see, spankyboy do.
IMHO, an even more attractive and compact typeface than Verdana. A good Comic typeface would be a step in the right direction too.
Don't forget that the point behind Georgia, Trebuchet, Comic Sans and Verdana was that they were to be extremely legible at small sizes.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
So give people 5 or 10 years protection on fonts. The current laws are unreasonable. The lack of a rich public domain is evidence of the laws not accomplishing their original intent.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
"now don't even get me started on the lame jokes about bill gates. you all are just jealous cos you'll all never be like him, which you all secretly want to be."
Yea!
I would love to be the most hated person in software history. Not to mention to have the ugliest wife on earth. I think i start by selling crack and work my way up to Bill Gates level!
MS and Netscape came up with a pair of incompatible solutions. The MS solution is still supported by MSIE 6; I have no idea if the Netscape solution is still supported by Mozilla. Does Mozilla support the MS method? What can be done to achieve a technology that would work in all the major browsers?
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
so, why doesn't someone just fire up fontographer and make a copy of andale mono with a different name and distribute that? if corel can rip off adobe fonts for profit, surely linux can get away with ripping off a M$ font...
--
Twinbee is lovely character. Perhaps you will enjoy with him?
What the fuck does compiling a kernel have to do with creating a font? I'm a software engineer, not a typographer. How many "linux hippies" claimed that they were totally self-reliant and could create any font that they needed? Would that be, oh, about, say, NONE?!
If you could see further than the dick in your left hand and the copy of Windows in your right, you'd understand that the issue here. Microsoft's own FAQ on the fonts said:
So now that they have convinced people to design web pages around them, they want to screw over anyone not running Windows, making their system fail to render the web pages correctly.
oh, and learn to read too, maxxy. asking someone to prove a point they never made is fucking dumb.
Learn to write, fuckwad. It was "fucking dumb" when you demanded that the "linux hippies" be "self-reliant" and make their own fonts when when they never made a point of saying that they could.
By the way, I primarily run Windows. But I'm not an ass-lick (like you) that thinks that Microsoft can do no wrong.
Some may flame me for this, but I question why one of the commercial distros hasn't already dealt with this blatantly obvious problem?
It seems to me like RedHat or Mandrake would have already realized that it'd be smart to invest in having someone improve all of the X fonts.
Sure, people could try to put together a donation page for this, and it might have some limited success. I think you'd have much greater success if a well-known distro put out a want-ad saying "Now hiring font specialist for 6 month to 1 year contract project."
If your distro looks much more readable than the others, it gives users one more reason to install your "flavor" of Linux, and to possibly buy support for it and purchase commercial copies of it in the future.
seems the license change scheme in place at ms and others is not unlike bait and switch retail tactics. bring the customer in thinking they are going to get product a in a good deal and they end up with something similar but different, and the vender makes are larger profit due to the switch. I once long ago worked for a retailer that got busted for this, we advertised a product we would barely stock, the customer would come in, we would be out, and the saleman would sell them the private label "just like" product in which we had a large margin on. is changing a license "at will" so much different than this, and isn't the point of the change to devripe previous right, and force the purchase of a future product/service?
So what? They probably did it because there are plenty of other sites out there with free fonts and they needed more space on their servers for their own bloated software. Give them a break for crissakes.
TeX still has some of the best looking fonts I've ever seen. Can X be tweaked to use that lot?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
People have this notion that MS went into the BSD source, grepped for a key phrases, exported the code, and then compiled it into Windows. This is simply untrue. They worked from the reference implementation - just like everyone else!
/mount/dos/Windows/System BSD
grep
kthxbye~~~
In light of the observations above on the Georgia et al. EULA, does anyone have the EULA for arialuni? Perhaps it was offered on the web with similar terms.
Why do I need to care about monospace, (sans-)serif, ligatures, drop caps, and all that other nonsense? Why does a publisher? I can read my 25 year old Courier-typeset Pascal book by Jensen and Wirth with much ease when compared to the horrible proportional font chosen by Stroustrup in C++ (I guess the same attitude which decided THAT, decided most of the design for C++).
sexy rather than content-filled, in which case, you belong in marketing, not on Slashdot.
Designing a font is nigh-on an artform. For it to work properly, first of all, you need to create between 70 and 130 characters (as a minimum) which are all consistent, work together properly (i.e. fit properly next to and above/below each other) and, most importantly, look good.
That's which someone can "'own' a fucking font" (in your words)... It takes a lot of work (sometimes years to do a whole Unicode font) and costs a lot of money to do. Take a look at the majority of free fonts on the market - if they were developed for free, chances are they have a lot of characters missing (especially accented characters needed across the world outside the US) and a lot of bugs.
its always nice to see some love. *muacks*
kthxbye~~~
Just add your (or someone's) Windows font directory into your X fontpath. Works like a charm. If you ever got any copy of Windows because MS didn't want you to buy a naked PC and you are not using it at the same time with Linux, this should be within fair use. There is also a possibility of running cygwin font server on your secretary's lonely WinXP/OfficeXP box. Yeah it kind of defeats the purpose if you run Linux because it's open source. But a lot of people run it just because they like it or in my case (haliluah!) to port their company's commercial product.
ooh! was that sarcasm i smelt?
oh the humanity of it all gnaws at my very being!
I've been designing fonts for a little while now. It is probably one of the hardest things I've done. Little nuances have to be kept just so, or the font comes out looking like crap. Several hours can go into designing just a single character.
What's truly difficult is making a design look good on screen. Think about it. Your monitor is probably around 100 dots per inch. Your printer is probably 600dpi or better. When you see it on screen, it looks like a speck of dirt. That's where True Type instructions come in. Let's just say that can take a while. Fifty years later, you finally have something that looks good on paper and on screen. It's enough to make you want to quit after the first letter.
For those that want to start designing fonts, check out FontLab. It isn't cheap, but for what it does, it is the best available right now. For somebody that just wants to toy around, High Logic's Font Creator Program will probably do. It only does truetype fonts and you can't do instructing, but it is only $50. My personal opinion of pfaedit is that it is crap, but you can't beat the price.
It's not a "notion":
http://www.daemonnews.org/200108/dadvocate.html
There is little doubt that M$ has used BSD code. Debug symbols that were not stripped out in beta versions of NT leave little doubt, no? The extent is what is in question.
There is nothing illegal about this. I was merely pointing this out since the original flamer was implying that either a) he, or b) Microsoft was self-reliant. So yes, my point is still valid, and YES, I still have one, AC.
What open source tools can I use?
i know this sounds troll, but if you don't know which tools to use you are not the right person to do this.
designing computer programs is not rocket science, but it comes pretty close. programming might even be the equivalent of rocket science in computer science.
what we certainly don't need is hundrets of people making up amateur open source softwares, but a few people who know what they're doing.
what might be possible is to find and old program (most common programs are quite old, and the other good programs usually are based on them), or a former-eastern-block program and recompile it. but you still need quite some experience to do this. i personally wouldn't even try.
It's possible to own mindless patents on fucking fonts. See US patent 5,155,805, which covers basic math (project one vector on another and add the result to a point) as applied to glyph outlines. This is part of Apple's hold on TrueType.
Well most fonts can be converted quite easily. I've converted Windows fonts to Mac and to Linux. If anyone wants some help in getting their favorite fonts converted (and possibly hosting a library on their machine), I'd be glad to put in a little work on creating a free font library for Linux; I've got a couple thousand available.
Just a thought
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
How difficult would it be to convert TeX fonts into OpenType or whichever?
They seem to be quite gorgeous, and very nice in print (pretty good on the screen, and possibly in the conversion there could be some talented souls who would modify them slightly to make the screen legability higher)
I guess I am completely unsure of what license they are under, but isn't all of TeX pretty open?
There are several ways to get better fonts in linux:
1. Get one of the major type houses (Adobe, Bitstream, etc.) to release the most common fonts as open source.
2. Make it easier to enable the bytecode rendering in FreeType in all applications.
3. The big linux distros (Mandrake, RedHat, etc.) should release a pay-for copy of Linux with Xfree bytecode hinting enabled and with a good set of licensed fonts. Linux itself would essentially be free, but what you would be paying for is the license fee for proper Truetype rendering and the artistry that went into desinging a nice set of fonts. I know this goes against the "open source" ideals, but designing good fonts is literally an art and perhaps paying people for their work would be reasonable...
Of course the ultimate solution is to attract typographers to the Linux platform. I don't see this happening anytime soon until the following happens:
1. A distro ships with Bytecode rendering enabled in ALL desktop applications. (Designers aren't techies--they aren't going to recompile this into applications!).
2. A robust desktop publishing app becomes available for Linux. Yes, I know Scribus is getting close--but it's not there, yet.
What an idiot. Someone needs to tell your parents to cut off your internet connection for a while and give you a "time out". What is a "fucktard" anyway, someone who screws slowly?
...and so is usability. Quite a bit of work has been done with "unreliable" Microsoft Windows because it is "usable" in ways Linux is not.
Or, to put it another way: It doesn't matter how reliable Linux is if it can't do the job -- and quality fonts are required by graphic artists, publishers, authors, and people who prefer a professional-looking system.
All about me
You must have learned your style of writing and reasoning from Eric Cartman. *Sigh*. I never should have fed the troll, anyway. For all I know, your comments could have been banged out by a million monkeys for all the intelligence they contain. Have a nice day.
Here's the EULA for andale32.exe, which matches the MD5 you gave. Looks like you CAN use the fonts, which are available at SourceForge: Original fonts which match the MD5's given above.
Microsoft TrueType Fonts
END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR MICROSOFT SOFTWARE
IMPORTANT - READ CAREFULLY: This Microsoft End-User License Agreement ("EULA") is a legal agreement between you (either an individual or a single entity) and Microsoft Corporation for the Microsoft software accompanying this EULA, which includes computer software and may include associated media, printed materials, and "on-line" or electronic documentation ("SOFTWARE PRODUCT" or "SOFTWARE"). By exercising your rights to make and use copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, you agree to be bound by the terms of this EULA. If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, you may not use the SOFTWARE PRODUCT.
SOFTWARE PRODUCT LICENSE
The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is licensed, not sold.
1. GRANT OF LICENSE. This EULA grants you the following rights:
Installation and Use. You may install and use an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT.
Reproduction and Distribution. You may reproduce and distribute an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT; provided that each copy shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of this EULA. Copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone basis or included as part of your own product.
2. DESCRIPTION OF OTHER RIGHTS AND LIMITATIONS.
Limitations on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, and Disassembly. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.
Restrictions on Alteration. You may not rename, edit or create any derivative works from the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, other than subsetting when embedding them in documents.
Software Transfer. You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this EULA, provided the recipient agrees to the terms of this EULA.
Termination. Without prejudice to any other rights, Microsoft may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA. In such event, you must destroy all copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT and all of its component parts.
3. COPYRIGHT. All title and copyrights in and to the SOFTWARE PRODUCT (including but not limited to any images, text, and "applets" incorporated into the SOFTWARE PRODUCT), the accompanying printed materials, and any copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT are owned by Microsoft or its suppliers. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is protected by copyright laws and international treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat the SOFTWARE PRODUCT like any other copyrighted material.
4. U.S. GOVERNMENT RESTRICTED RIGHTS. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT and documentation are provided with RESTRICTED RIGHTS. Use, duplication, or disclosure by the Government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS 252.227-7013 or subparagraphs (c)(1) and (2) of the Commercial Computer Software-Restricted Rights at 48 CFR 52.227-19, as applicable. Manufacturer is Microsoft Corporation/One Microsoft Way/Redmond, WA 98052-6399.
LIMITED WARRANTY
NO WARRANTIES. Microsoft expressly disclaims any warranty for the SOFTWARE PRODUCT. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT and any related documentation is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including, without limitation, the implied warranties or merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. The entire risk arising out of use or performance of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT remains with you.
NO LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES. In no event shall Microsoft or its suppliers be liable for any damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business information, or any other pecuniary loss) arising out of the use of or inability to use this Microsoft product, even if Microsoft has been advised of the possibility of such damages. Because some states/jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of liability for consequential or incidental damages, the above limitation may not apply to you.
MISCELLANEOUS
If you acquired this product in the United States, this EULA is governed by the laws of the State of Washington.
If this product was acquired outside the United States, then local laws may apply. Should you have any questions concerning this EULA, or if you desire to contact Microsoft for any reason, please contact the Microsoft subsidiary serving your country, or write: Microsoft Sales Information Center/One Microsoft Way/Redmond, WA 98052-6399.
YEAH. If MySQL is so good, why does it do this?
...because Mozilla kept on putting on a .txt or .exe extension on my downloads.
Can you say ' sarcasm '?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
People can own fonts just like they can own computer programs. Truetype fonts are bytecode programs that draw a symbol with given characteristics (point size, etc). They can be quite complex. They seem trivial, but creating a good-looking font takes a LOT of effort. If you don't believe me, try drawing a font (even if it's based on a public-domain typeface) that looks consistent, has good kerning, has good hinting, and that you can scale down to 8 pixels while making it still look good and retain its main characteristics.
Typefaces may not be copyrightable, but computer fonts definitely are, given that they are fairly complicated programs that take a lot of effort to create.
There is an incredibly rich public domain.
For evidence of this, visit the following website:
http://www.sacred-texts.com
Or go to:
Project Gutenberg.
The fact that you can't download any and everything you want for free isn't evidence of lack of a ricn public domain.
Anyone remember the good old days of Wired when they used radical page design? It was cool, if unreadable at times.
Yes, and it's one of the reasons why I cancelled my subscription, eventually...that, and, IMHO, Wired went downhill fast as soon as the Internet got the attention of big corps.
In any case, I'll never forget when one of the MST3K crew said, "Well, at least this is easier to read than Wired magazine", about some horrible movie credits. It's too bad MST3K is gone. Few shows (or any other media, for that matter) did such a fine job of commenting on pop culture than that show did.
Looks to me like someone threated to nail M$ for copyright (or whatever IP fonts happen to live under) and that caused MS to mail big time.
This wouldn't be the 1st time for this. The early versions of MS C verion 5.0 had exactly the same optimizer problems of GCC of the day. I think that MS went a bit far stealing a font and they got nailed by one of their favorite laws....
PFAEdit is a sophisticated graphical editor for designing and editing Postscript fonts.
I looked in to PFAEdit and saw that it required Cygwin and XFree86. I could never get Cygwin and XFree86 to work on my Windows laptop, even after Reading The F[...] Manual. Thus, PFAEdit as it exists at the time of this writing is useless to Windows users such as myself who have not been able to successfully configure Cygwin and XFree86.
If anybody is willing to help me get Cygwin running, he or she should send private e-mail to tepples at spamcop dot net. However, note that when I could not get Cygwin to work, I deleted it to make room for school related files, and until September 2, I will be stuck behind dial-up access to the Internet and unable to stay on the phone long enough to download the latest version of Cygwin.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I would but I've already posted =)
The fonts were posted under an EULA that allows them to be re-distributed in un-modified form. They are still available at http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/!!
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I'm the maintainer of the msttcorefonts Debian package. This package has not been pulled (at least not yet).
.exe self installer. Putting the fonts in a .tar/.deb/.rpm for easy installation, even without modifying the fonts themselves seems to violate the license.
.deb files. Yes, there's a tools directory with fips and rawrite and similar non-deb packaged tools useful for installing, but there's not really any current place for these fonts to go. But I'm sure this will get solved before the next major Debian release. ;)
There's some discussion of the situation and the EULA for these fonts in Debian bug report #156503.
As far as I know, it should be ok to redistribute these fonts without modification, but that means leaving them packaged in windows
So for Debian, the problem at this point is one of logistics. The fonts can be distributed, but Debian's mirrored ftp archive system isn't really set up to handle anything other than
Many compressed .exe's can be uncompressed without having to be executed. So the obvious solution in this case is to find or write a little script that decompresses this particular exe, and distribute it alongside it.
Just another example of the short-sightedness of the Linux makers.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Several hundred books and short stories out of the millions of things copyrighted in the last century? I wouldn't call that very rich. A copyright should not equal a lifetime meal ticket, that does no motivate creation of new works, that motivates lawyers and lawsuits.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Is TrueType 'free'?
It may be free in some areas outside the United States of America, but until U.S. Patent 5,155,805 expires on October 13, 2009, some important parts of TrueType technology are not free in the U.S. or in countries that have signed mutual patent recognition treaties with the U.S.
Besides, the particular fonts in question are probably copyrighted until 70 years after the death of the designers who worked on those fonts. A typeface cannot be copyrighted, but a hinting program (there's usually one in every TTF) can.
Will I retire or break 10K?
...should be taken out and shot. Personal prefernce I know, but years of seeing shitty PowerPoint presentations and Word documents laid out in it have convinced me it's the sloppiest, ugliest, most unprofessional-looking typeface there is. It's not even good for lettering comic books.
The only good use i've seen for it was when I got a credit card in the mail. It was in an envelope, badly printed with my address in blue Comic Sans. Inside that envelope was the real one, a regular windowed envelope marked "disguised mail". The Comic Sans had done a good job looking unprofessional, to hide the fact it was a letter from the bank.
C:\Windows\Fonts:>FTP linux.dummy.net
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
Connected linux.dummy.net FTP Server
User: MyID
Password: ********
ftp> cd
ftp> md truetype
ftp> cd truetype
ftp> prompt
ftp> bin
ftp> mput *.tt
ftp> quit
Session Closed
C:\Windows\Fonts:>
OTOH, I don't see what stops [Debian from] throwing the [Microsoft Typography] fonts into nonfree...
Microsoft's license stipulates that redistribution over a computer network must preserve the file names at the file transfer protocol (FTP, HTTP, SMB, etc) level, but the Debian non-free repository does not accept .exe files.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I am a new user of Linux. IMHO one of Linux's biggest shortcommings is the fact that FONTS are UGLY in Linux. Without the M$ truetype fonts it is VERY ugly. Linux cannot hope to fully compete in the marketplace if it cannot address this. Mac looks, Windows looks good, XP looks fantastic, Linux fonts suck. Even following all the tips in the font ugly howto they still suck. M$ knows this so they closed the door.
I have checked the MD5sums and I have perfect copies of all these files, with the exception of the last one, Aruniupd.exe. (what the heck is that?)
I don't have a place to host them, but I can upload them if someone does.
I'd post my email address but I don't want to drown in mail.... just reply to this post with an address where I can put them and I will do so today.
i don't see what the big deal is, of all the M$FT fonts included with Windoze, the only two fonts that work worth a damn in Linux is Tahoma and Ariel, the rest look worse the the default ttf fonts included with Redhat...
anyone can upload ttf files most anywhere on the interet and then they would still all be available to anyone, and piss on any copywrite or eula, just use em...
They also said they were not to be used in commercial distributions FUCKWAD. If this had been your precious little GPL that was violated you'd be singing an entirely different story now wouldn't you.
idiot.
Microsoft has also removed free access to Arial Unicode MS, the massive font that covered all of Unicode (to the extent that a TTF could, i.e. Basic Multilingual Plane only).
p d.aspx
This font used to be available at http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/aruniu
Now there is a message saying it is available only in Office and Publisher, which is true, but with Office 2K, at least, you have to make a point to install it, as it is not part of the default installation. Technically, I don't think the license on this download page ever allowed one to use it if you didn't buy Publisher.
Actually what is says is that it's OK to violate Microsoft's license terms, but if you screw with the GPL then you belong in jail.
Fucking unbelievable double standards you guys have. Seems like this "community" is only interested in getting stuff for free.
Sure, there's nothing stopping you from, say printing the glyphs from Verdana really big, scanning in those print outs and then using autotrace to get the curves, and then using pfaedit to create you own font and calling it Veronica. The problem is, they will probably look like shit. You can't just rename the original font file, since the actual implementation of a font is copyrightable (if that's a word).
And that's the problem. Creating the design of the glyphs requires a lot of talent and an eye for aesthetics, but there's already plenty of beautiful fonts, some of them hundreds of years old, so not copyrighted. Creating a computer font that looks good on screen in any resolution is the real problem -- it requires lots of hard work tweaking the kerning and hinting.
If you look closely you should be able to notice the difference between a high quality font and a cheap rip-off. Just compare them side by side at different sizes on screen.
But please, if you feel you have any kind of artistic talent, start fooling around with pfaedit and see what you can create.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Georgia is a serif font and Andale Mono is a fixed-width font based on a sans-serif typeface, there are no mostly-sans font types.
Some fixed-width sans-serif typefaces such as Lucida Typewriter (called Lucida Console on Windows) have serifs on the 'I', 'J' 'i', 'j', and 'l' glyphs.
Fixed-width fonts ... are not very good modern on-screen fonts as many of the parameters the fixed-width fonts were designed to solve are no longer an issue.
Do you claim that the unavailablity of <table> tags for tabular information (not for layout) in the subsets of HTML used by Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and Everything2 is "no longer an issue"? And why does Mozilla still display the <textarea> into which I type this comment in a fixed-width font?
Fixed-width fonts have NEVER been good for print.
Fixed-width fonts were good for print even before Gutenberg reinvented movable type. Chinese, the language of the first inventors of printing, is typically printed with a fixed-width font. So is Korean.
Will I retire or break 10K?
STOP with the fucking "M$"! IT IS CHILDISH.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
They were free, but Microsoft asked that they not be used in commercial packages. People were using them in commercial packages, so rather than waste money trying to enforce the license, they just took them down.
'course if this was the GPL, you'd be going after the people that "stole" them, rather than beating up the supplier for defending their license rights.
Both free-as-in-without-money and commercial Comic fonts here:
http://www.blambot.com/
Definitely much better than Comic Sans.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
We always knew we were relying on MS Typography's generosity, and that these could disappear at any time.
I hadn't heard about these fonts until a few weeks ago, and up until then never used them. Somehow I've survived. However, I agree that we need better fonts/font support in Linux, but if you've played with a recent copy of Mozilla or Galeon/XFT/Artwiz Fonts lately, things have come a long way.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
"Wah, it takes years to design a decent font, wah, you smart coders have dissed designers too long, wah, now we've taken away fonts for your precious linux."
I guess they're right - most designers do suck. However, through the beauty of software, all it takes is one good one to get off their duff and write a font. Microsoft's withdrawl of their fonts may be just the impetus that some smart, underapreciated typographer needs to get started on winning the fame and fortune they deserve.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Get them hooked on freebies, then start charging. Microsoft lured the web to its fonts, and now you can only get them with a Microsoft browser. Doh! But we won't get fooled again.
.Net for Linux?
BTW, where do I download
The Crossover packages automatically downloaded and installed these (and other) programs from the Microsoft web site. They did so in an ethical way; all the EULAs were displayed, and the Crossover people warned you that you might be violating EULAs in the case of actual Windows components.
I suspect that they were pulled because they were being used by a program that let you use your (purchased!) Microsoft Office programs in a way of which Microsoft doesn't approve. (run them on a non-MS operating system).
Another great example of why free-as-in-beer isn't always so good. Ever hear of the King's shilling?
Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have copies of almost all of these font files (because of Crossover) and I can upload them if someone provides a mirror.
> and we'll be flooded by some absolutely awful-looking work (OpenOffice, etc.)
> that make Linux users looks like hacks
Last time I downloaded OOo it didn't have any fonts! As far as I know this is a major difference to StarOffice. So I'm wondering: which fonts exactly did you look awful? It certainly weren't OOo's.
Hugo
When I first read the title of this story I thought it said "Microsoft Tyrrany Withdraws Free Web Browser". Oh well, we can only dream.... :)
A copyright doesn't equal a 'lifetime meal ticket' it just makes it possible that the combined royalties from various creative endeavors might put food on the table.
You're not entitled to other people's creative output for free. We don't live in that sort of world, that economic model has failed.
Get real.
They also said they were not to be used in commercial distributions FUCKWAD. If this had been your precious little GPL that was violated you'd be singing an entirely different story now wouldn't you.
And poor little Microsoft could not afford the legal costs to defend their license, could they? It's so sad how they are always being bullied by Linux and *BSD users. What a bunch of flaming bullshit. Microsoft could have written a single letter to any entity that packaged the fonts with a commercial distribution and that would have been the end of that.
But you just ignored the important part: Microsoft said that the fonts would be freely downloadable and anyone could use them. They encouraged web page designers to use the fonts in their web pages. Now that the fonts have been used that way, Microsoft is pulling them in order to break other OSs that relied on the ability of their users to download the fonts.
It's stunts like this that make the GPL so appealing. If I release something as GPL, I can't wait until thousands of applications and people rely on my work and then say "I'm taking my ball and going home", which is what Microsoft just tried to do here.
idiot.
I'm happy to see that you've started signing your postings.
it's nice to use big words, but it's even nicer to use them correctly.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Fixed width fonts are crucial on screen and in print for:
* source code listings
* columns of numerics
$0.50
$0.50
-----
$1.00
* ASCII art - shall it never perish from this earth
(no pre tag, lameness filter choking on comment chars wastes 20 minutes of my time, thanks guys)
I'd pay fifty cents a line to keep my text properly aligned; why you could get rich if you helped me do this !!
while ( true == fixedWidth ) {
sourceCode = WM_HAPPYMESSAGE;
}
And another thing: Fixed width fonts should really be fixed width!! Do you know how many times I've tried a 'monospace' font whose glyphs have different widths when I have selected bold ?!? This is heinous in syntax-aware code editors that will colorize/bold language keywords.
(Yes, it's true that the coders and the DTP people don't understand or respect each other's needs. Monospace fonts are sometimes derided on a.b.f, much to my dismay.)
Hehe :) This defnitely seems like the best way of squeezing insightful comments out from /. readers :) I promise, I wont do it anymore :)
I also say, yes it's all true, but _please_ stop with the stupid M$, anybody used to a corporate world sees this in the post, and ignores the rest, as he files the whole as stupid childs posts, just because the $ letter. Cooperation do make money, and thats perfectly okay in itself, the discussion just goes about not doing evil ways like misusing monopoly status, forcing people into contracts, simply lieing and all that, but $ is okay. So get your guts together and just write microsoft, everything else is just childisch and actually hurting the free community in their public relations into the commercial world.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Hello,
I made a decision, some time ago, to only support standards on my website. I thought that MS was offering a standard when it offered these fonts, so they are in my style sheet. Given this development, I think that I'll change it. My website may look less good with IE, or whatever, but it is a service, rather than something upon which I depend. If I ever go commerical, perhaps I'll change my mind.
Best wishes,
Bob
Is nothing sacred? Now, you commie OSS degenerates have committed font abuse. How disgusting. We should have a group of concerned organizations look into this. How about the Font Anti-Abuse Alliance (FAAA)?
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/makefont/
I think it'd be interesting (and very difficult) to create a program that would render characters from a font at various sizes in various pairings and arrangements and intelligently analyze the curves and such other characteristics as kerning to create an identical font. Like I said, though, it'd be extremely hard to do. Where's John Carmack when you need him? =)
Probably my favorite thing about Andale Mono is that the zero has a dot in the center, making it trivial to distinguish from the letter O, which does not have the dot. Few other monospaced fonts today have that feature.
To programmers, that's a big win. In fact, making C-syntax characters look different ("1" v. "l", "{}" v. "()", "O" v. "0", "." v. ",", ":" v. ";", "'" v. "`") should be a priority for anybody working on an Andale Mono replacement. (Andale Mono could be improved on a few of these).
I've often wondered if I might even use a font where a "{" had an extra do-hickey (not quite sure what that would be) to distinguish it from "(". Even if it didn't look like a traditional "{" it might be a win. (But of course, I'd have to see it first).
(P.S. Since I'm dreaming, I might as well wish for a pony, too...)
See up there where it says "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."? Public relations is not the purpose of Slashdot (indeed, PR is the opposite of news), and anyone who puts style above substance deserves whatever flawed ideas they end up believing.
font making is not something you just 'pick up'. It requires years of experience and study of existing fonts to even start making something decent. Typography is undertaken by few because of this. In addition, the work is tedious, and painstaking. You have to commit to this, it may take years before you are good enough to make a suitable replacement for these classic fonts.
Photos.
OpenType is the bastard child of the fight between Microsoft/Apple and Adobe (yes, TrueType was spawned by Microsoft and Apple when Adobe was being stubborn about Type 1 licensing fees.) In the end, they all made up and created OpenType, which despite the name, has nothing to do with Open Source. It's a superset of instructions for fonts which can encapusulate an existing Type 1 or TrueType font in an OpenType wrapper.
It may be a better font format, but it doesn't solve any problems with regards to IP ownership.
The subtle humor is great....+5 Funny!
Heh, sorry for the misleading subject. Actually, in the US you can CAN own a font, you just can't own a typeface. A font is a computer program, and as such, is protectable under copyright law. The name of a font or typeface (like Helvetica) is a trademark, and as such is protectable under trademark law. However, the design for the typeface itself, although protectable in many parts of the world (Europe, Australia), is NOT protectable in the United States.
This pisses off font designers in the US. Ironically, the preceedent for this dates back to the 18th century, when US font manufacturers (who made their fonts by pouring lead into moulds), wanted free license to rip off their counterparts in the Old-world. They got fonts declared non-protectable, much to their chagrin several centuries later...
Back in modern times (about 10 years ago), this loophole was exploited by fly-by-night punks (precursors to spammers) who created "shovel-ware" CDS, packed with fonts created by scanning in the output of established fonts. The lazier ones omitted the step of printing out and rescanning typefaces, and instead resorted to "jiggling" the coordinates in an existing font and selling the output as their own, or by ripping off commercial/shareware/freeware authors by taking just the font and renaming it. These guys (the ones who skipped the scanning step) got slapped with a lawsuit by Adobe and a bunch of other font producers, and have since disappeared.
The point? You can own a font, you can own the name of a typeface, but you can't own the design for a typeface in the US (with one exception - if you can get the US Patent office to grant you a design patent, you can own the design.)
And, creating typefaces (and going one step further, turning them into fonts) is a difficult and underappreciated occupation in the US, so don't be surprised if few people (if anyone) rise to the challenge of creating one for free.
It's hardly "news" 4 days later.
They did lift the socket interface from BSD... Only MS did not get inheritance right. A socket is not a file in Windows. You can't read, write, or close it the same way.
.NET. TcpClient and TcpListener are both sockets, but they do not inherit from Socket. Somebody seriously needs to teach those MS guys about proper inheritance.
I saw the same mistake made in
And correct me if I'm wrong, but... How can BSD be considered the "TCP/IP reference implementation", given that the BSD code was not royalty-free until the 1990s? OS vendors who wanted BSD code had to fork over big cash to AT&T and UC Berkeley back in the day. I don't think MS would've wanted that. (And it shows, seeing as how Windows didn't have integrated TCP/IP until the BSD legal issues were fully resolved, and all was free.)
TCP/IP was around before BSD, too, though several BSD services we take for granted on the modern net were not, obviously...
My bride found these...
http://www.1001freefonts.com/fontfiles/main.htm
!!!
An idea I've had for some time involves using METAFONT, the font generating software for TeX. We need a program that takes a fairly high resolution bitmap of a few characters of a desired (fairly standard, serif or sans-serif) font, then fiddles with the parameters and generates a "computer modern" type font that looks like the font we're copying. Then one could use METAFONT to Postscript or True Type conversion software, if one is foolish enough not to use LaTeX. :)
It wouldn't work for cloning bizarre fonts like Comics Cartoon, but it should automatically clone most normal fonts.
You'd probably be interested in ProFont - a font designed for programmers, which has existed for years, but few outside of the Mac programming community know about it. It was specifically designed to be readable at 9 point, with similar characters distinctly different, as this page demonstrates. The full distribution includes TrueType, Type 1, and bitmap versions of the font for Mac and Windows. You can also download a look-alike bitmap version for Windows here.
I've been using ProFont for years as the font in my editor when coding, and found it very helpful.
I remember back in the day I think it was slackware that allowed you to choose types of fonts for the linux term. not sure if I found/ran a prog that did this, or if it was a slack option, but I remember runnin it all in Kidprint. Anyone else remember doing this? Anyone know how it can be done today (program or other)?
OK, Microsoft, you just lost a big customer. Because of your anti-competitive actions my company decided not to buy your products any longer. Say no to visual studio .njet.
Just use this SuSE modified script
_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/webdin32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/andale32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/trebuc32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/georgi32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/verdan32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/comic32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/arialb32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/impact32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/arial32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/times32.exe \_ fon ts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/courie32.exe \
/usr/local/incoming/Ti-Mou
... " ..." ... " /dev/null ..." /dev/null
/usr/X11R6/bin/ttmkfdir ]; then ... " /usr/X11R6/bin/ttmkfdir | grep -v "^[[:digit:]]*$" > fonts.scale.msttfonts
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype /sbin/SuSEconfig --module fonts
Don't forget to change the directory to where you
want the downloaded files. The difference here is that it downloads files from a site that has the files and doesn't bore you with the microsoft ULA.
It also doesn't delete the files when it is done.
#!/bin/sh
FONTS=" \
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core
"
if [ "`id -u`" != "0" ]; then
echo "error: You must be root to use this program!"
exit 1
fi
cd
for archive in $FONTS; do
file=`echo $archive|awk -F "/" '{print $NF}'`
echo "$file:"
echo -n " Fetching
wget -c $archive
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "failed
continue
fi
echo done
echo -n " Extracting
cabextract -l $file &>
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "failed
else
cabextract $file &>
echo "done"
fi
done
for i in *.[Tt][Tt][CFcf]; do
lower=`echo $i|tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`
test "$i" != "$lower" && mv $i $lower
done
chmod 644 *.tt[cf]
echo
if [ -x
echo -n "Creating fonts.scale
chmod 644 fonts.scale.msttfonts
echo "done"
else
echo "error: ttmkfdir (SuSE package ttmkfdir) is required to create fonts.scale!"
exit 1
fi
mv -f *.tt[cf] fonts.scale.msttfonts
It's true that Andalé Mono is very good fixed-width font. I particularly like the way it makes it hard to confuse l with 1, 0 with O, etc. And yes, it scales very well. The first thing I do when configuring any app that uses fixed with fonts -- Xterm, console text editors, IDEs, web browsers -- is to replace the usual Courier or system font with Andalé Mono. Which is not all what MS intended, and mostly illegal. Imagine my dismay!
One quibble with this font is that multiple underbars form a continuous line, which makes source code slightly harder to read. I keep looking for a free font that lacks this problem. But that mostly means amateur efforts, which rarely scale well.
Microsoft may be less a culprit here than AGFA and the other companies that licensed these fonts to them. AGFA charges 22 bucks for each download of Andalé Mono, and no doubt they licensed the font with the understanding that it'd only be used for specific purposes. When it became clear that everybody and anybody was downloading these fonts for all kinds of purposes, MS either had to pony up more licensing fees, or withdraw the fonts. Hardly suprising they did the latter.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that several versions of Windows contain an "ftp.exe" that includes (if you run 'strings' on it) the string "Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California."
That doesn't come from merely "working from the reference implementation".
-- Alastair
Bitmap fonts! If I still had my Hercules Softfont video card, I'd be interested. But what's the point of developing non-scalable fonts for X-Windows?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Guess it's time for the OSS people to make..."
Why the hell should they do it? You're the one who wants the fonts, either do it yourself or run Windows. Open/free software isn't about entitlements, because nobody owes you a goddamned thing. People do Open/Free work because they want to, not to satisfy geeks who want a free stuff to dick around with.
There is an excellent web site called Dmitry's Design Lab that shows you how all the standard elements of design (color, shape, texture, etc.) apply to web sites. He is also one of the authors of the book HTML Unleashed, if you've ever read that. Personally I find it quite fascinating site because I'm usually up to speed on the technical details but when it comes to the actual concepts of design I start venturing away from my areas of knowledge. Anyway, the article on fonts is a great read. It goes over a lot of the history behind fonts, and explains some of the terminology.
The fonts were deliberatly withdrawn the day LinuxWorld Expo opened. I assume the date was carfully picked - giving "a finger" to the Linux community as a whole, as well as to expo participants from Codeweavers, in an attempt to make their Crossover Office demo look bad.
Boy did you tell off that guy! Of course, you didn't do anything to explain how the Free Software Community can do a better job of producing open-source fonts. But at least you established your moral superiority!
>These fonts are still available from the ...assuming EULA's are legal!
>Corefonts project [sourceforge.net]. This is
>perfectly legal and in accordance with the EULA
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Shut up. There were probably 20 people that submitted it before you anyway.
... your ignorance.
;)
>The technocrats argue that "making fonts can't
>be that hard" and "just whip some out in the
>Gimp", betraying their ignorance.
Most people don't give a damn about all that. They don't want thousands of fonts all of whom have been lovingly hand crafted by gifted people who spend many years slaving over the curliques of every little nook and cranny on the letters.
One font is enough - and how hard can that be
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
look, the crux of ChaoticCoyote's argument was this supposed "elitist and myopic attitude" in free software would prevent good designers from wanting to get involved, Shelled pointed out that how this was obviously bullshit FUD if you actually take the time to READ what people really say. The Free Software community draws contributors from all different walks of life, including talented graphic artists like TigerT and Jimmac (check out the new Gnome 2.0 icon set) and the the guys that do the newer KDE icons.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
Just an FYI on font copyrights. The US copyright office does not allow anyone to copyright a font. They are afraid that someone will try to use it to copyright the alphabet, so that whenever someone uses the letter "A", they will demand a royalty.
The way font copyrights work is that the the software that renders the font is copyrightable intellectual property. Or rather, the code that that makes up the Open Type or True Type version of Helvetica is copyrighted, but not Helvetica itself, as an image. So, it is perfectly OK to to reconstruct any previously designed font, including any in the MS library. Of course, this is easier said than done. A deep knowledge of fonts, their inner structures, and the way to configure them for use on computers is a high art, and takes years to master. Fonts that are not executed well, even copies of pre-existing fonts, will show their flaws fairly quickly, so I wouldn't worry too much about unskilled artisans producing bad versions. The cream will rise to the top. Besides, it is a good reason for anyone to introduce themselves to the world of typography.
"Anyone who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep." (Frederic Goudy)
Do we need a Free Font Foundation?
I've tried for some time to get some high quality fonts "donated" to Gnome or XFree86; although this work is still continuing, we're not getting very far. Here's why. Maybe you can help.
It's *difficult* (as others have said) to design a successful typeface. For a poorly hinted font, an hour or two on each character design will get you basic latin one in about five weeks, and then you spend another two weeks with hinting. If that sounds a lot of time, remember that you need to adjust sidebearings (nn sit further apart than oo, or you'll get spots of light and dark on a page/screen, for example) and kerning (Wa closer together than Wh, "r," closer than "n,", "fk" further apart to aviod a glob at the top.
It turns out that an R isn't simply a P with a tail, an E sn't an F with an extra leg, in most designs, particularly the more calligraphic such as Palatino.
So, it's a lot of work to make a font, and for Linux and the Free Software movement, we want fonts that support as many languages as possible, and as many scripts as possible, so that as many people as possible can use the software.
That means even mnore work, and a lot of time from people who are primarily creative artists and designers, with a strong techincal background.
There are three main font formats in widespread professional use today: TrueType, Type 1 and OpenType.
It turns out that TrueType fonts are more expensive to produce in high quality than Type 1 outlines, because with Type 1 outlines, most of the hinting is in the renderer, so the code is only written once; with TrueType, individual fonts have bytecode instructions to do hinting, and it's different for each font.
OpenType lets you embed both Type 1 and TT outlines in the same font file, along with metadata for supporting lots of languages. So if yuo use Type 1 outlines, you avoid the Apple patent on TrueType.
One way forward would be to gather enough money to pay some font designers to make some new fonts. Another way would be to make a one-time payment to buy rights to existing fonts. Probably best would be a mixture: start with existing fonts and extend their Unicode coverage.
What would a Free Font be? Probably we need something slightly different from the GPL. In particular, it might not be OK to redistribute a modified Free Font without making clear that you have changed it, because otherwise you could reduce its quality or destroy the artistic integrity of the design, and give the artist who designed it a bad reputation.
Font *outlines* (i.e. the design of a typeface) are protected by copyright outside the USA, because they are recognised as artistic works. In the US, they are not protected, for historical reasons. In both cases, the font *names* are often registered trademarks, so you see Palladium because Palatino is a trademark, I think of Linotype; Dutch instead of Times (Monotype), Swiss instead of Helvetica, and so on.
This means it's not OK to start with existing designs, unless they are old enough - e.g. using the original designs of William Caslon from the 1720s is OK, using Adobe Caslon is not OK, at least not without permission.
So, we need type designers to give permission, or to make new designs.
We need more work on the FreeType Type 1 support, so that we don't have to worry about the software patent on TrueType rendering.
We need an independent legal entity so that designers have someone to negotiate with, and so that money can be paid to them. Maybe the Gnome Foudnation or XFree86.org would do, as long as the fonts can be used with any software, not just Gnome or the X Window System.
I do not have enough time to do a lot of work here, but I *am* willing to help introduce people to font designers and other resources, and to help explain the technological issues.
Hacking on a font renderer takes serious skill, as does designing fonts. But maybe programmers can contribute to FreeType, and to pfaedit (how about a Gnome port, too?) and to ghostscript. Programs like Mandrake's FontDrake can be worked on (it's GPL'd I think).
Who wants to help build a font portal, somewhere people can download Free Fonts from, and with links to font designers who can help customise fonts, and to non-free fonts you can buy?
Who wants to donate a server and some bandwidth?
Set up a mailing list?
Remember, we need fonts that are Free, not just ones that don't cost anything, and we need high quality, and support for lots of languages.
If you read this far, my thanks, and let's make something happen. Post here, or feel free to send email [liam at holoweb dot net, will work]
Liam
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
And no, the fonts you mention are not damn easy to create.
geek narcissism is so interesting.
sorry 'bout the typo.
The goal of LFP is to "make" legible, West-European and Cyrillic Public Domain bitmap fonts
Now that Freetype finally has a way of producing high quality scaled / hinted / antialiased / subpixel rendered truetype fonts withou violating the apple patent, and not now that there's tool out to manage that, I'm NEVER going to use fixed width fonts again if I can avoid it. I'm sitting here on a Red Hat beta machine and out of the box antialiasing is perfect - basically because work from the xfthack projects `half hinting' setup has made it into freetype itself in the last six months.
GUI objects have always been an issue for Unix, I think.
:)
And this is not just about fonts. Icons too. With beginning of GNOME, some icons looked really good, but some other ones are horrible. Look at BE, when they started, they had a whole set of Icons for all common applications. We don't have that for linux or unix or bsd, or whatever.
GFX artists haven't really embraced OpenSource as much as coders do and I think this is just a wakeup call that code itself is part of the equation, but Good Looks have to be there too. But any time someone brings up good looks, that person is shut up with kde zealots screaming "it looks good to me". Well, how can you argue with that?
There was a time when artists were poor and drew for food and pennies... Oh what happened to that...
Um, sorry, I must have come in late. Can someone explain what an "ASSHAT" is? Is it something you wear with "fucktards"?
I'm willing to try my hand at making a core set of fonts for Linux. During the last few years. I've studied typography and designed a number of my own fonts.
Now, I have some familiarity with Linux but am still an outsider to the Linux community. What group should I contact to help channel my work? What kinds of fonts are people looking for? When the fonts are finally finished, who shall distribute them?
You know, words like "troll" and "FUD" make less sense every time I hear them. They accuse people of cynically saying things they don't themselves believe, just to score points in an argument. Ironically, accusing others of doing this is a convenient cop-out for people who themselves don't want to deal a difference of opinion. If you're serious about refuting me, you should attack my opinions, not my motives. Which, face it, you know jack about.
IANAT (I am not a typographer), but only last week I stumbled across this interesting article entitled 'The Scourge of Arial', written by a designer called Mark Simonson (who, IMHO, show some slick design work elsewhere on his site).
The article discusses the history of several common / well known fonts, where they evolved from, and why.
It could make a refreshing change if we were to see the death of these Microsoft fonts -- if they were replaced by something better.
Man, you folks are a bunch of whiners. I've never heard a sadder bunch of whiners that you open source people. Boohoohoo. MS took away my folks and now all my Open Source Software is as ugly as a witches teat.
First it was opn asking for money and the debian users all whining. Now it is the people who want to use MS Intellecual Property in a way the MS doesn't want you to. Some much for freedom, so much for choice. MS preserved and exercised its choice to remove the software. Please respect Microsoft's attempt to keep people from using their own software to take away their market share.
In hindsight, it seems very dumb that such a crippled platform was so dominant for almost 20 years. But this was nobody's plan. Everybody, including Microsoft assumed that MS-DOS would be obsolete the very moment these early processors became obsolete. The plan was, as soon as 80286-based systems arrived, people would switch to "serious" operating systems such as Unix and OS/2. But, for a variety of reasons, this didn't happen, and the weirdness of MS-DOS will only disappear when the last Windows ME system is junked.
I'm sure this turn of events actually distressed the geek in Bill Gates. Of course, it also made him the richest man on the planet, which must have been some small consolation.
I would like to see several of the recent "Desktop" Distros to come together and invest some resources to put together a viable free solution for the open source community. I'd bet Lindows, et al, installs these fonts to make the desktop look prettier. Now with this avenue of eye-candy drying up, they may need to either look elsewhere or come up with their own gig.
Either post the URL or stop saying interesting things about it!
And I'm very tired of being told that I'm a "M$ pimp" because I refuse to concede that Open Source shit doesn't smell. I've been a Bill-hater since you were in diapers, kiddo, and I'd like nothing better than to see a real challenge to the Redmond monopoly. Which challenge is not going to be made by people who smugly refuse to accept any and all criticism!
Knuth put a whole lot of effort into designing fonts for TeX, such as Computer Modern Roman and the Euler math font. Even though these would have to be converted from METAFONT to a modern encoding, I think such a conversion would still be easier than starting from scratch...
(apologies for the bad typography in the above post ;)
Who's fucking dense? The original poster wasn't talking about a zillion fonts, he was talking about one. The time it takes to make just one font that's suitable to be read on screen is astounding. The MS web fonts are hinted (the pixels are hand placed) for I think about 8 different point sizes, in order to maximise on-screen readability, and to get a good result, it's an inordinate amount of work.
Contrary to what you may believe, designing 'plain' fonts for on-screen readability is much, much harder than designing decorative ones for print. So many factors need to be taken in to consideration in order to preserve the look of the font, yet keep it readable on-screen at the same time. And half-arsed jobs won't cut it. When you're looking at fonts day in day out on screen, they need to be as readable as they possibly can be, otherwise you're leading to eyestrain and frustration. Your comments about Arial being easy to recreate from scratch are hilarious. Have you ever designed a font? Have you ever gone through, analysing each character and hinting them at multiple sizes? You coudln't jsut copy the MS version since that would be copyright infringement - it's have to be a completely original work from scratch.
There are reasons there are professional font designers - it's a full time effort that can span months or even years for a font family (eg. bold, italic, etc.) It's not the sort of thing that some dude in a basement can knock up over a weekend with some coffee and pizza.
There's probably lots of stuff out there that is now public domain. The problem is, how much of that is accessible? Promoting creation of material, and making it accessible by the public are two entirely different problems.
Think about that the next time your local library throws out part of its collection because it's running out of room to store those items, or because funds are not available to preserve them.
Supposedly, the Library of Congress is supposed to have a copy of everything that is copyrighted. This is no longer true these days, because of space issues - they'll let you turn in a "representative sample" of your work, ie a set of photos for a film. Keep in mind though, that there's plenty of stuff that's never explicitly registered, and barring some collector preserving a copy of the item, these items will not survive for future generations to enjoy, as the copyright laws originally alloed.
I would suggest an amendment to copyright law: set the upper bounds for ownership of a copyright by a corporation to 25 years, with PAID extensions in 25 year intervals until 100 years. The paid extensions would go toward restoring and preserving material in the Library of Congress collection. Essentially, you're licensing the right to continue charging for the work in exchange for supporting the preservation of the work for future access.
Again, to re-iterate, access is just as important as copyright when material passes into the public domain. If I was evil I could try and recall and destroy every copy of my work before my rights expired. When the rights did pass into the public domain, they would be useless because there wouldn't be a copy of the work left.
This isn't an academic issue - consider films like Gone With the Wind, where portions of the original technicolor negative were severly damaged, because the studio neglected the film for so long. Who's to say the assets of MGM will not fall on hard times AGAIN, and be allowed to rot further? Or, the original Star Wars, which now exists in the "revised" Lucas form. I don't have to be explicitly evil to deny my work to future generations, I could just be incredibly neglectful (not hard to do if you're a corporation.)
Ironically it may the pirates who preserve work for future generations. Already some film restorations have been made possible only because someone found some footage, some from academic repositories, and some from "private" collections. Who's to say that digital works (arcade roms, early amiga/apple II/commodore games, etc.) will not go the same way...
However, the main thing is if you allow value to be preserved indefinitely (100+ years is pretty indefinite), there will be no incentive for the copyright owner to allow copying, so long as they can milk the item for as much money as they can. Setting an upper bound (75 years) and forcing them to maintain the copyright by filing extensions and paying maintenance fees (as they have to do with patents) would help balance things. Either that, or they have to ensure that the copy at the LOC is kept in pristine condition for the duration of their copyright.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/defau lt.htm
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
free-as-in-without-monetary-cost
You mean "free-as-in-beer," right? Come on, maintain the convention. Guess it's a little off-topic, guess I'd better post anonymously...
What did you expect? You walk up to a project, say it looks like crap, and say the only way it won't is if they drop all their opinions and take up yours?
If anyone, coder, designer, artist, whatever came to any of my projects with that attitude I doubt I'd be very eager to welcome them in.
Everything will be taken away from you.
It *pays* to have the best monitor you can buy.
Anything less will hurt you no matter what you run.
As opposed to applying the massive development methods to fonts, wouldn't it make sense to get together some cash (by donations/possibly the distributions could help) and commision fonts (as onw would commission an artwork or composition) from people with known track records at making good fonts with the stipulation that these fonts be released under the GPL, possibly even allowing the consortium to hold the copyright for safety's sake.
Of course, lots of the best font designers are locked up at Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple and because of IP agreements couldn't enter into such a deal...so this would have to be avoided (possibly using people outside of the states where agreements aren't so crippling to individual expression).
Any Takers?
Brian
One of the links is to a guy who insists that Protype is the best font for coding at 9 pt. Which might be true, but that appears to be the only size the font actually works at. And, alas, some of us prefer to work at high-resolution!
He also complains that the font isn't available for Windows. I think that's just a matter of proper packaging. But somebody else can do that -- I've lost interest.
I am left wondering at the apparent cluelessness of their marketing team. Is Microsoft pretty much completely run by its legal staff now? Companies increasingly seem to revel in that haughty, because-I-can attitude for which attorneys are so well known. But surely even they must realize they have nothing tangible to gain and a lot of goodwill to lose by taking back all their legos and going home. Or will the next move be to file a patent on scalable fonts and slap infringement suits on anybody who dares to generate their own?
I know a good type designer who worked for Adobe for quite a number of years. She's now freelancing. If anybody is interested in hiring a professional type designer for Linux, I'd be willing to put that person in contact with her. Not long ago she won a silver Morisawa award for one of her fonts.
What about starting a Blender-type project to "liberate" (i.e., open source) some critical closed source fonts? This would at least buy some time until OSS typographers could get up to speed...
I thought that Micro$oft was the evil empire? I thought that we were supposed to boycott their products? I didn't know that it was ok to use the empire's products when they are *FREE*....kind of funny to see all this whining now. If you are anti-Micro$oft, then DON'T use ANY of their products, no matter how convienent, cheap or good they may be. It strikes me as a bit two-faced to see people exaulting the open-source and free software religion while they are actually in bed with the devil. Be pure or be silent.
You do realize, don't you, that there is a word for that kind of activity?
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Fonts are patentable, in design patents. Fonts are patentable as articles of manufacture - This is a kind of legal fiction to keep patent law in line with the tradition, when type was made out of wood or metal, of being protectable. Therefore, to protect software fonts, they must be claimed as embedded in something, such as a computer screen. One title suggested by the USPTO is "portion of a monitor displayed with a computer icon image." See MPEP 1504.01(a). Bezuwork's friend
1. got it backwards: Verdana and arial are sans and Georgia is serif
2. LMAO at the KDE engineer's comment `personally, I'd be embarrassed to use them.' 'cause I'd swear KDE uses Georgia digits in its startup splash window =D (Myself, I thought Georgia was the best thing M$ had had for years.)
and some are even free!
www.chank.com
www.fontalicious.com
its amusing to see how you assume all the ACs responding to you are one and the same person.
since i'm one of them that replied to earlier, i can tell you that's not the case, you FUCKTIT MORON!
KDE3, that is
hello and welcome
let's cut to the chase shall we? yes, an ASSHAT is indeed something you wear with a fucktard. remember not to turn it inside out, as is always the case
bye, and i love you.
They obviously haven't listened to the corporate mantra about the evilness of the GPL, they have a link to &cond under the freeware foundries section. Oah yeah, &cond distributes their fonts under the GPL.
...I'm NEVER going to use fixed width fonts again... You mean will never use the command line again?
mp3: l33t term for empty.
Apostrophic Laboratories has a huge comic font set (50 total) called Komika that's well worth checking out. And it's freeware ("except to produce material that is racist, criminal and/or illegal in nature"), as are the rest of the foundry's fonts - mostly display, I think.
#!/bin/bash -x ... etc: paste missing lines
# this code is ugly, don't run it.
lynx -dump http://www.fontz.de/html/fontz-html/a.php3 > foo
lynx -dump http://www.fontz.de/html/fontz-html/b.php3 >> foo
#
lynx -dump http://www.fontz.de/html/fontz-html/z.php3 >> foo
cat foo | grep de\/files\/ | cut -d\. -f 2-6 | uniq > bar
wget -i bar
rm foo bar
# TODO: visit pages a2, a3 etc using grep \[??\]?eiter
# unzip, mv and X business
# - Oozers have a plight to owe "Wow! Her dater's boozed!"
"And who wants to program fonts when they're trying to program something cool?"
Dear Sir.
I'm a professional programmer enamored of all things technical. I love to paint and fish and take long walks.
I've thought about going into typography and UI design. Sadly I cannot, for I've just been informed that it's not a cool thing to do.
So I sit here in front of my computer, submitting to peer pressure, churning out cool things like word-processors and kernels.
Sincerly: Under Pressure.
Actually, I cannot instantly come up with a word from jargon, that would describe it correctly.... enlighten me?
"Anyway, my point is that font design should be left to the professionals."
With advice like what's being bantered around this site. It's a small miracle that any ever become "professionals" Are these guys bio-engineered in a lab somewere? "Force-feed" everything typographical, then let loose in key areas of the country (aka font founderies)? Only to grace us with their works every seven years? Glad I'm just a programmer.
"Basically, the elitism is on the Linux side when it comes to programs that work well for most people. "
"Programs that work well for most people" Funny, I always thought that was a major selling point of most Windows software. I guess we better shoot for "Works outstanding for everyone" before that damn "Elitist" tag becomes permanent.
and anyone who puts style above substance deserves whatever flawed ideas they end up believing.
You don't have any idea how human thinking works. And unfortunally style is important, it's just the the way it is, ignoring that will bet you in position to deserves whatever flawed ideas they end you are believing.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
You just have to look in the right place. They may have removed the page that allows you to download the files, but they didn't remove the files themselves.
In design school, my primary professor was a type junky. She taught us a great deal of things about type design and usage. One of the more enlightening things we learned was that typefaces are not copyrightable. Only the names of the typefaces. Given this fact, all someone needs to do is to import a bunch of your favorite fonts into something like Fontographer and export them back out with different names. Bundle the resulting "new" fonts into an RPM or somesuch and voila!
What!? High resolution is only good for more lines, not bigger fonts. Why would you want a bigger font instead of more lines? It makes not the sense!
* 2002-08-15 09:38:44 Microsoft Pulls Free Web Fonts (articles,microsoft) (rejected)
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
Oh and something else I thinked of, rating something -1 Overrated because you don't agree is an absolut indication that you didn't understand the moderation details. If you don't agree hit reply, not moderate. If you think the post falls into one of the catagories avaible to moderate then moderate, but you personals views or agreenes on the answer should not affect your moderation (in an ideal world).
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Mickeysofts Giveaway Fonts where solid, good Typography. I'm suprised they gave them away for anyone in the first place.
This is actually a good chance to get some GPLd Fonts under construction. The community needs good everyday capable scalable vector fonts - which are very rare - and, no, Motifs ultracrappy pixmaps aren't an option. This also is the time where we should be looking into the future and construct only complete sets of Unicode fonts rather than the 10millionth Helvetica rippoff.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If I understand it fonts themselfs cannot be copywritted, only their name. So you could theoretically take all the WebFonts, and redistribute them under different names with all the distros.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
You don't need to bother with WINE. Cabextract will do the job just nicely.
Actually, there were other fonts designed specifically for the screen long before Verdana. Susan Kare did the fonts Chicago, Monaco, Geneva, New York and so on for the original Macintosh in 1984 -- I believe long before Verdana and the others in Microsoft's library came out.
Verdana was one of the first scalable fonts specifically designed for the screen, that is true.
Also, as others have pointed out, Verdana, Tahoma and so on are not "lost" per se. Microsoft's own license on those fonts allows for free unlimited distribution (so long as the distributor does not derive profit from their distribution), and they also come pre-installed on Windows and Mac systems; anyone that installs Internet Explorer also gets them free.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
When will we wise up and build a license agreement interface into rpm? Sure, we like our software to be free, but we should accomodate licensed software as well. That is - if we want to give the users the freedom of choice.
Now, we get cumbersome installation interfaces that don't fully guarantee an installation (like 'run this program afterwards').
Stop the brainwash
Font design is a justforfun business, the artists are so poorly paid. that"s why it will be aesy to get the professionals to make good fonts for us. Just because we cann afford to pay them.
Their installation program integrated the download of the fonts from Microsoft. Guess they didn't like that. I wouldn't either. However, since the license of the fonts permits it, Codeweavers can just change the download URL to point to a mirror with the original .exe files. :-P~~ Microsoft. Another defeat. Thanks for those fonts, we love them. And we keep them.
Remember, with DRM Microsoft could have just revoked your rights to use the fonts and your PC would not let you continue using them. Fight DRM!
I tried to show you a solution to this sort of problem here a while back.
:) I already got them all.
Well, I'm going to try again. Click here for your pretty fonts
MS will probably find a way to remedy this, so act quickly.
its amusing to see how you assume all the ACs responding to you are one and the same person.
I assumed that because I did not realize that there were so many stupid fucks on Slashdot. I had hoped that you were the only one.
I picked up a CD four years ago with 360 handwriting fonts alone for $5. I'm sure theres thousands of abandonware fonts out there that would make a good base to start from.
Its fact.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You misread my quote. I believe that there's an accidental elitism for Linux because most of the common programs are so damn hard and complicated to use. Additionally, virtually all Unix-based applications for mass-market uses are always playing catchup in functionality to Windows and Mac applications. Virtue and stability alone do not make for a great computing experience.
I know these generalizations are pretty crummy, but these sentiments are shared by a lot of intelligent people that have seen and tried a little bit of Linux, only to abandon it for the solutions that, in the end, get the job done more frequently.
Yea, I have to restart Windows sometimes when I don't want to, but I'd rather restart to a set of programs that I find comfortable and useful rather than have a rock-solid stable system that feels like a pain in the ass to use. This is because of comparatively anemic hardware support, because commercial developers choose to write great programs on other systems only (leaving it to amateur programmers to play catch up), because user interfaces for many Unix programs in general are downright unfriendly, etc. Whatever the reasons, you end up with the same results.
I have tried Linux before, and I admire it for the fact that it tries to bring change to the software world. But I have yet to find a distro that makes me love Linux more than miss Windows.
Personally, I think the problem that makes designing "on-screen" fonts so hard is that the truetype standard doesn't support (well) using bitmaps for small point sizes. It really would be easy, like a weekend's work, to do bitmaps by hand for a font at a few small point sizes. What makes it difficult is trying to fake the same thing using hinting. (Of course, designing the font for large sizes is no cakewalk, anyway, but I do think the difficulty of hinting lies in the fact that hinting wasn't really a good idea to begin with.)
By the way, in the United States at least it's not possible to copyright a typeface, so it wouldn't be infringement to copy the MS version.
And this got me thinking... I've got enough friends who like to use comic sans & other unreadable fonts in emails & instant messages... what if I copied fonts that are actually readable, and renamed them Comic Sans and the like? When others chose Comic Sans, will it display on my PC in the replacement font?
nt
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It's my understanding that TrueType uses quadratic splines to render fonts. Judging by the output of latex would it not be better to jump ahead of windows and use cubic interpolation to render??? What are the extra computing loads that this would cause? Anyone out there an expert? It would be great if X windows could look as clear and good as TeX does. Also for once we wouldn't be playing catchup with M$ Any opinions on this?
I agree with you. A google search on stubear turned up this link.
Toph
Actually, PFAEdit claims to do OpenType and TrueType as well. Except that the FAQ says that it doesn't grok TrueType hinting, which is used by both OpenType and TrueType. Which probably means I can't tweak any of the fonts I care about, none of which are PostScript. Oh well.
He was probably right when he said that quote...
after all, how many ENIAC, MANIAC, etc. style machines were there?
This quote seems akin to saying that there is no need for more than one grandfather clock per nuclear family... but I've been through at least 10 wristwatches, not counting my siblings!
p.s.
I really liked your statement about how patent lawyer have twisted the language in new and interesting ways (From the IPFilter article). If I used sigs, I'd probably have a variant on that one.
You'd be thinking of something like METAFONT (see, e.g., http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/fonts/metafont.htm l), then. I've seen elsewhere in the thread that it outputs some old formats, but it specifies fonts as families algorithmically. Knuth has even added an enourmous library of glyphs in the Computer Modern family. Perhaps the OSS community should provide a way for the output to be used directly in Linux, etc.?