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."
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.
"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.
And yet, Slashdot, the site that posted this news, is still using Times New Roman.. ironic.
No, not ironic. Slashdot does not still use Times New Roman. Your web browser still defaults to Times New Roman. I have my default font on my MS box set to Tahoma, and Slashdot renders in Tahoma and is much easier to skim because of it. If anything, Slashdot's solution is the "most open" solution.
The real question is, "Why are you still using Times New Roman, when other better web reading fonts are out there?"
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.
...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
designing fonts is not rocket science, but it comes pretty close. typography might even be the equivalent of rocket science in design.
what we certainly don't need is hundrets of people making up amateur open source fonts, but a few people who know what they're doing.
what might be possible is to find and old font (most common fonts are quite old, and the other good fonts usually are based on them), or a former-eastern-block font and reconstruct it. but you still need quite some experience to do this. i personally wouldn't even try.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
Actually, I would imagine that Slashdot is one of the very few sites that doesn't suck, and uses what ever fonts your browser specifies. Of course, since I have fonts disabled, I only see Times New Roman and Courier New in my browser anyway.
<RANT>
Do any of you adults out there remember when Tim Berners Lee came up with this stuff, and how HTML was just supposed to be a recommendation on how to present the data, and not a formal definition of what it's supposed to look like? Hmmm? If you develop a site and you want it to look a specific way (then you're... nm), then use flash or pdf or postscript. But if you give me HTML, I'm going to render it the way I want to see it rendered.
</RANT>
-brian
Also, remember that you aren't just designing an ASCII character set. You need a math font, such as the STIX project, and what about Chinese, Arabic,...?.
Anyway, to answer your question, Knuth's Metafont is a standard part of TeX. It's a special-purpose programming language for designing scalable fonts. Way ahead of its time! The problem is that its output isn't in any modern format. There are various conversion tools, but I don't know how good they are (pktrace, textrace, ps2mf, Mathkit,mktekpk).
There are also some free font-design tools that I know even less about: PfaEdit, TTX (converts between TT and XML, so you can edit by hand).
Find free books.
You're right of course. However, making font design tools widely available is still a good idea. If we want more good fonts, then we need more good designers. And if we want more good designers, then we need to give people who aren't designers yet the tools to get there.
What do you think Hermann Zapf's first font looked like? Probably horrible.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
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
I seriously want to know why people have moved away from TNR.
Because it's harder to read, at least for me (and apparently others). I find sans-serif fonts like Arial much easier to read.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
> Something to checkout for people wanting free fonts: Linux Font Project
Note they are working on bitmap fonts, not truetype fonts.
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.
we certainly don't need is hundrets of people making up amateur open source fonts, but a few people who know what they're doing
I disagree. I think hundreds of people making up amateur fonts is exactly what we need. After a while, a few of these people will get really good at it, and then we'll have the latter half. Meanwhile, and more importantly, a font design sub-culture will have been established.
The only way to learn rocket science is to DO rocket science. I have never, ever seen a difficult field that could be learned any better than by just flat out trying to do it and puzzling through every obstacle.
what we certainly don't need is hundrets of people making up amateur open source fonts, but a few people who know what they're doing. How those people who know what they are doing know what they are doing? I they had to start somewhere, right? So go ahead people, release your fonts, mark it version 0.01, and keep improving it. Someone might even pick it up and improve it. Once it gets version 0.05, it's gonna look a lot nicer. Once it gets verseion 1.0, you will be one of those who know what they are doing
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Serif fonts are nice. The little serif bits (like the ornament on an uppercase T) make it easier for the eye to follow over long passages in type, which is why most newpapers and books are set in serif faces. These serif faces are derived from Roman carved typography such as Trajan's colunm. Sans serif faces (without serif) start appearing in the 19th century, and were orginally known as grotesque faces.
However, scale a serif font down to 10 points (72 points in an inch), then draw it at 72dpi on a monitor, and the curved ornaments become a single pixel which do nothing for readability. How fast do you read words on a screen compared to words on a page? Yup, there really is a measurable difference. Good antialiasing helps, but you're still nowhere close to the detail you would see at the same size on paper. Even well designed serif fonts such as Helvetica or Gill Sans are hard to read small on low resolution screens. This is why MS comissioned the MS web fonts, and they really are OK on screen. Surprise yourself, try them in your HTML 1.0 browser.
...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
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Linus started doing the kernel, had many significant portions done, AND THEN people started helping in other areas. I certainly don't think anyone who wants to give it a go should be discouraged, though. Just because they are not currently a "rocket scientist" doesn't mean they won't become one.
...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.
Hundreds of people learning to make fonts won't result in good fonts, just hundreds of people frustrated at the amount of time they wasted in making fonts nobody uses.
Designing fonts from scratch takes years to learn; even copying fonts takes quite a while. I've worked with type designers and have, in fact, created my own fonts, one of which is a rendition of an older font (from the 30s) called Albertus.
It's a tedious process even with good tools. It's mostly about drawing and then matching those drawings to PostScript-possible splines.
Unlike kernel development or software collaboration, in which hundreds of people can each contribute something that winds up in the final results (or even tens of thousands), font design is a lonely profession with lots of abandoned work.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Hey,
I think hundreds of people making up amateur fonts is exactly what we need.
The problem with having lots of fonts is I have trouble keeping more than about 3 fonts in my memory. Specifically, I know of 'system' (fixed width), 'times new roman' (normal writing) and 'arial' (sans-serif normal).
My fonts folder has no less than 463 fonts. I don't need more fonts - I need a few select, high quality fonts.
The only way to learn rocket science is to DO rocket science.
Um... it's conventionally learned by years of study in school and university, leading to a degree in Physics, before you even approach a real rocket.
The font Times New Roman took two years to design, and considerable research into legibility and readability.
Anyway, here's my point: Designing a good font takes years of practice and experience. Hundreds of amuteurs producing mostly chaff only makes sorting out the wheat harder.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Yeah - and do any of you adults remember how that completely sucked and how we tried desperately to get away from it?
Yeah, I remember that. Invisible pixels in tables because the blockquote style looked so goddamn awful. Background images that wrap and look terrible. The original HTML design truly was an exercise in idealism gone horribly wrong. It is practical for bland academic homepages and such, but for online publishing it is truly rotten.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Sounds like a genetic algorithm might work well, with a human viewer providing the fitness test.
Given that having a human decide the fitness of each generation will increase generation times, we could speed it up again by enlisting all those hundreds of amateurs who can presumably recognize a good font even if they can't produce one.
The difficulty would not be producing the individual letters, but keeping the "look and feel" consistent across all characters in a font set. The genetic algorithm's "genes" (units of iinheiritance) would have to consist of higher level abstraction, such as "serif" or "bold" or "elongated". These higher abstractions would then be applied to create a character set with a consistent look, perhaps in a way analogous to embryogenesis.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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...)
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.
DON'T TOUCH THAT GUITAR! It takes years to get good at it! And you have to take a vow of silence of live in a monastery! Just leave it to the experts for heaven's sake!