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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."
What open source tools can I use?
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
...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
Why? I happen to like Times New Roman. I don't like many of the "hipper" fonts people tout. This isn't meant to be a flame... I seriously want to know why people have moved away from TNR.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Or is it adobe property?
linux people won't make/use fonts (or anything else) unless everything about them is free
Why?
If you're asking why it's ironic, it's because the web fonts' primary purpose (I believe) was to move away from the classic fonts like TNR.
If you're asking why people started to move away - it's a matter of style. Just like you don't often see advertisements with serif-text.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is a great idea! For one thing, we could have quality free fonts for Linux distributions to use. Most of the "free" and "donated" fonts on Linux are honestly pretty crappy and aren't good typography by any stretch of the imagination.
And it would nice to have an official "Linux" font, which might even show up in print.
We could call the font "Penguin", Penguin bold, Penguin Oblique, etc. Unless there's already a font with that name, then we could call it "Linus". And there could be a big all-caps all-bold font called "RMS". Heh.
Someone who knows about this stuff should see about commissioning a Linux font and putting it into the GPL domain (or whatever is appropriate, I guess a font is like a mini computer program in some ways).
The only contemporary typographer I'm familiar with is Jon Hoefler, I believe he's a pretty hip guy so maybe he'd be willing to design and give away a font for a one-time fee. Who knows..
Unfortunately fonts in general have to be designed by a single person or team, because the glyphs all have to look the "same". So open-source font development would probably be a bad idea.
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?
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.
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?
I've designed reasonable fonts on the Mac. Of course, I had a nice tool (Fontographer, I believe).
... that takes a huge amount of time, and you'll probably need to construct kerning tables for each of the letters. (I used a size-to-fit rectangle. Variable width letters, but no kerning at all. And no serifs on my more successful attempts.)
General purpose fonts can be quite difficult, but specialized versions aren't that hard. I rather liked Eirier (a stylized celtic font). But note that my stylizations were almost all done in a way designed to ease the process of creation. I was less happy with my old english version.
But the important thing here is having decent tools for font creation. Being able to design with Bezier curves is v. important. And so is being able to see both an large and a small version of the letter as you are editing it. And, of course, being able to do the editing with the work in progress sized to occupy most of the screen.
Now it you want to get into a fancy font, with overlapping letters and serifs
If the tools were readily available, people would be creating fonts. It's something that lots of people get interested in. (I think most of the results are pretty awful, but you pick the gems and leave the rest. Remember that Apple itself was the source of the "San Francisco" font, of which it has been said, "The only reasonable use is writing ransom notes.")
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If by that you mean destroyer of reasoned discourse, I'd agree. All the highly rated posts prior to yours are from 'technocrats' explaining how difficult and expensive is font creation. The reason for the lack of free fonts is that Linux and open source software is about, if it's not already obvious, software, not graphic design. It's a programmer's movement and they don't typically design fonts. And to propound that open source software's success hinges on acceptance in the graphics community is idiocy.
If there's anything here myopic and elitist here, it's your superior attitude about everything Linux.
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.
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
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.