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Microsoft Typography Withdraws Free Web Fonts

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the kindness-of-strangers dept.

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."

4 of 579 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How do you design a font? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    How do you design a space shuttle?

    I heard 3ds max is a good tool?

  2. Re:LICENSE by mpe · · Score: 5, Funny

    They're already distributed here

    Next week Microsoft will be filing a patent entitled "The process of closing stable door after the horse has bolted".

  3. Re:Anyone else see the irony? by EvilTwinSkippy · · Score: 2, Funny
    You web whipper snappers have it so easy. Back in my day we had only 3 fonts:
    • Times
    • Helvetica
    • Courier
    And we we grateful... Oh course those are back in the days when you had to do hex math in your head, and walk uphill to school both ways. Circa 1999.

    To tell you the truth, I've never strayed away from the big 3 on any project. I tend to write stuff that has to look good on browsers dating back to the birth of the net. (Never know what version of Netscape those crudgy old kiosks are using.)

    My stuff is ugly by design damnit.

    --
    "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
    --Dr.W.Edwards Deming
  4. Re:LICENSE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Wasn't that the plan behind this patent?