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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."
PFAEdit is a sophisticated graphical editor for designing and editing Postscript fonts.
MLT - simple and robust open source multimedia framework for Linux
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.
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
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.
opentype overview
-Kevin
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.
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."
These fonts are still available on the Wayback Machine. Just paste in the font URL from this story and go to the old page. Select "from the current server" to download.
Since the EULA allows for unlimited redistribution I have to think this is a legally acceptable method for acquiring these fonts, no?
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
As font design can take years per font and even longer for an entire font family, I doubt you are going to get any professionals to donate their work just so they can have it named after themselves. Designers aren't as vein as many make them out to be. We take pride in having our work displayed but we also like to be compensated for our efforts.
I designed the Boston Breakers (WUSA) logo and I get giddy every time I see the signs outside the BU stadium or on NESN. By the way, my own website has another version of the logo I felt was much better suited for a sports team, so if you don't really care that much for the logo as is, blame the client. I designed a MUCH better wave and stashed the words "Boston" in a pill box beneath/slightly over the word "Breakers". I'm sure the designers at Chermeyeff and Geismar are rather elated whenever they see their own work on TV, billboards and signs around the country.
Anyway, my point is we don't design to have our names on the logos, fonts or collateral materials, we do it because we love design and solving problems. Our hobbies are our jobs and vice versa. We get paid doing something we truly love to do.
Now, this isn't to say we never donate our time and efforts. As a matter of fact, I am the creative design lead for OBOS (soon to be renamed). I have developed some preliminary design ideas for a modern GUI and am in the process of developing some functionality concepts to create a more user-friendly GUI. Hopefully the OBOS developers will see the wisdom behind the GUI and adopt the ideas I've been working on.
The biggest problem of most OSS projects is they do not make themselves available to people like me. Most developers think design is opening Photoshop and creating pretty pictures. Design is problem solving in much the same way programming is. We use a different language and set of tools but it is problem solving none the less. If the OSS community wants us to help them they are going to have to do better than offer to put our name in the credits, they are going to have to open their minds and listen.
"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.
Resolution. Serif fonts are very bad at low resolution. Sans-serif fonts are like cartoon stick figures and can be very readable at lousy resolutions. Good serif fonts depend on a continually varying line width which requires extremely high resolution to duplicate. (Shades of grey (Antialiasing) helps somewhat.) Look at newsprint under a compound magnifying glass sometime.
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.
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
One person designed most of the icons, and some of the fonts, for the Mac, Windows, and OS/2. She's famous in the design community. She's freelance and does design jobs. Do you know who she is? Did anybody in the Open Source world, back when the Linux companies had money, think to have her do the design?
Yes, they did.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/makefont/
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.
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.
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)