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."

Comments

Luxi fonts?

[CajunArson]

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!

Re:Luxi fonts?

[sporktoast]

I personally would like a replacement for the Comic-sans MS font

Me too. Any by that I mean something that will globally (in the very *literal* sense) find and replace every instance of Comic Sans MS in the world. Every memo, every church fair banner, every club membership directory, every goofy personal website, every instance where somebone needed to be official, but without looking so, you know, official .

It's the font equivalent of a winking smiley ;-) and it ought to be removed from the face of the earth.

-Sporktoast

How do you design a font?

[Anonymous Coward]

What open source tools can I use?

Re:How do you design a font?

[karm13]

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 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.

Re:How do you design a font?

[bcrowell]

Well, software isn't even the main obstacle. Designing a font is a huge amount of work, and requires lots of special training. The best typography is done by people who have devoted their lives to it. For that reason, it probably makes more sense to start from font designs that are already free-as-in-something, and just translate them into formats that are open and not patent-restricted.

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).

Re:How do you design a font?

[wfrp01]

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.

Re:How do you design a font?

[bwt]

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.

Re:How do you design a font?

[zome]

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

Re:How do you design a font?

[elmegil]

Is MetaFont open source? It's certainly free.

Re:How do you design a font?

[jhines]

Perhaps that is a place to start, better Metafont support in X and Linux.

Re:How do you design a font?

[spanky555]

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.

Re:How do you design a font?

[eggboard]

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.

Re:How do you design a font?

[Mike1024]

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

Re:How do you design a font?

[NearlyHeadless]

Well, software isn't even the main obstacle. Designing a font is a huge amount of work, and requires lots of special training. The best typography is done by people who have devoted their lives to it.

This is slightly off-topic, but there's an amusing shockwave story about the "Cooper Black" typeface done in the style of "Behind the Music" at Mastication Is Normal: Behind the Typeface

Re:How do you design a font?

[orthogonal]

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.

Re:How do you design a font?

[loconet]

Picasso, Michael Angelo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Rembrandt ....

None of them knew what a paint brush was until they got interested in painting.

Re:How do you design a font?

[bwt]

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.

Nobody said it would be easy and quick. Anything worth doing is hard. Besides, that kind of frustration is what brings people together to stop working as lone wolves and instead work as a pack. But it's important to have the lone wolf experience first so that you have the basic skills. I understand that font creation isn't exactly collaborative, but peer review is the engine of high quality work in any field.

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.

Good. You are the kind of person the Linux community needs more of. If there were a hundred people who had the experience you have, then I have no doubt that the "Linux font problem" could be solved rather quickly.

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.
I disagree. In fact, kernel development is much more difficult to coordinate because there are interactions between the different contributions. Two beautiful fonts have virtually no chance to get in each other's way.

Re:How do you design a font?

[eggboard]

I can't argue with such lovely optimism and good feelings. Despite my disagreement with some of the points you make, it's very hard to not have a big smile on my face after reading your post!

Re:How do you design a font?

[bwt]

ME: I think hundreds of people making up amateur fonts is exactly what we need.

YOU: 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.

I never said that we needed hundreds of fonts made by amateurs. Most of what newbies do in any arena is crap. What we need is PEOPLE who have mastered the basics.

ME: The only way to learn rocket science is to DO rocket science.

YOU: 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.

You obviously never saw the movie October Sky (which is a true story). No, the conventional way to become a rocket scientist is to build a bunch of rockets when you are 12 (anybody shot off an Estes rocket lately?), fall in love with it, and master the things you have to to reach the cutting edge.

Re:How do you design a font?

[Error27]

>>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.

I remember when I first started college, I over heard one of the computer lab workers laughing about me (a freshmen) struggling to install Linux on my computer.

"Does he think that he is going program the source code or something? Heh Heh Heh."

Three years later, my first code was accepted into the Linux kernel.

I believe people have a calling to be creative. I code. Some people paint. Some create music. Their are millions of people in the world with untapped talents. It's time to give them tools and start tapping... Writing kernel code is much easier than people said. I doubt that it is so impossible to create a font...

Re:How do you design a font?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Any child interested in Estes rockets is likely to be labeled a dangerous deviant the first time anything goes wrong. How can a child be considered responsible enough to handle chemical explosives like those used in engines? And don't even start on model glue.

Re:How do you design a font?

[nathanh]

Designing fonts from scratch takes years to learn; even copying fonts takes quite a while.

So? Coding is the same. It takes years to learn, and many more years to get good. Even copying code takes "quite a while". The "Open Source Community" has 100s of badly written applications written by novice programmers. But that's OK. The applications all get reviewed and the bad ones are ignored. It's a gigantic negative feedback system and it works beautifully.

I can't imagine anything better than 100s of novice font designers learning their trade by creating free fonts. 99% of them will suck, but it's the 1% that will benefit everybody else.

Re:How do you design a font?

[eggboard]

This is a very interesting notion: is coding better to learn over years than design/art? I would argue that for someone committed to it, absolutely the same difference.

What I've worried about in this thread has been an idea that you could sit down and in a matter of weeks, start making fonts that other people would feel good about using.

The difference between coding and designing fonts is surely that you can start coding useful stuff right away, typically, after you cross an early hump on understanding programming at all. Hello world! But with font design, you might spend literally months and months of intense work before you could make a font that someone else would find passable.

So my objection here hasn't been that people can't learn, but rather that a lot of folks would be spending a lot of town on a futile activity if they didn't pursue it for quite a while rather than perhaps focusing energy in areas which would be challenging but doable over different spans of effort.

It's surely one of those, did you major in computer science or art questions. I majored in art, but I spend a good part of each week writing perl and PHP.

Re:How do you design a font?

[nathanh]

What I've worried about in this thread has been an idea that you could sit down and in a matter of weeks, start making fonts that other people would feel good about using.

I don't see that idea at all. In fact, all I'm seeing is strong statements by literally dozens of people saying "NO that idea is not there". Everybody recognises that creating fonts - or icons, or pictures, or interfaces - is very difficult. Nobody is disputing that fact. No serious project will reject an offer of artwork or a donation of a font. But it's up to the artists to make the offers and give donations.

The difference between coding and designing fonts is surely that you can start coding useful stuff right away, typically, after you cross an early hump on understanding programming at all.

This is false. This is why Freshmeat and SF have 100s of useless 1~2000 line applications. Nobody uses them. A truly useful application takes many months to write even for a skilled programmer. I strongly disagree with your claim that there's a "hump" past which it's easy to write useful code. It takes years to become skilled enough to contribute meaningfully to Linux, or to XFree, or to KDE, or to GCC.

If an artist wants to contribute to a free software project then they should just do it. They should find something ugly, make it look better, and contribute the changes back to the coders for integration. If the artist's first contribution is rejected then they should try again. Linus rejected reiserfs and devfs for years even though the people working on those sub-projects were extremely skilled. A rejection doesn't necessarily mean that the contribution isn't appreciated.

Re:How do you design a font?

[eggboard]

I strongly disagree with your claim that there's a "hump" past which it's easy to write useful code. It takes years to become skilled enough to contribute meaningfully to Linux, or to XFree, or to KDE, or to GCC.

Sorry, I didn't mean useful to everyone, but rather code that does something. Crafts are hard (and fontmaking is an a craft and an art), and programming is also hard. But while you can't create a good work of art -- or most people can't -- that's meaningful in its own right just after learning the rudiments of tools, you can write small prorgams that work and carry out tasks pretty quickly.

But the jump from programs that work to contributions -- I didn't mean to imply that that could happen fast!

Re:How do you design a font?

[nathanh]

But while you can't create a good work of art -- or most people can't -- that's meaningful in its own right just after learning the rudiments of tools, you can write small prorgams that work and carry out tasks pretty quickly.

A first year art student can slap paint on a canvas but that doesn't mean the product is worth looking at. Similarly you can't produce a truly useful tool immediately after learning the syntax of the language.

As I said, Freshmeat is littered with buggy and inexpertly written applications. They have memory leaks or buffer overruns, improperly used APIs, poorly chosen algorithms, etc. These tools aren't very useful. It's OK though. The person is a better coder for having tried and failed than to not have tried at all. And even if I don't use the application I can still be grateful that they donated anything at all.

Even crappy artwork would be better than no artwork at all. There is plenty of potential for artists to contribute to open source projects. Even the atrocities churned out by a first year art student would be an improvement in many cases.

Re:How do you design a font?

[H310iSe]

Erm, they can't be patented/trademarked(?) that well since works of commercial art, as I understand it, have few rights to keep people from ripping them off. For example, a fashionable shoe from, say gucci, comes out, next thing you know a dozen orders go in to factories in Brazil to crank out shoes that look exactly like the gucci only 1/4 the price. Nothing illegal. Gucci never sues.

So, scan in FontX into Fontmaking Package Y, modify a couple little things, and generate font.

Or, is the problem Fonmaking Package Y doesn't exist? I remember working with font-builders in windoze like 6 years ago, nice, easy gui, it was illustrator-like.

Or we you just trolling and I bit?

Re:How do you design a font?

[loconet]

None knew they were geniouses until they tried it. Give the mind a chance. Cocky, arrogant attitude doesnt lead anywhere kid.

Re:How do you design a font?

[Hafer]

Well, I think, this is a question of handicraft, so I'll try to share some observations I made by actually do typography (not designing fonts!):

1st: Forget creativity. The most urgent need are fonts for everyday use. Be as boring as possible.
2nd: Fonts are there to be readable. Let the principle of least surprise guide you.
3rd: Don't try to be inventive. The best ideas are several hundret years old. Well, some of the worst, too.
4th: You'll do the spacing wrong.
5th: ...

Sure, there are some more obstacles, even on the technical side (on which I can't comment), but hey! I don't want to hinder you! Go on ;-)

hmmm

[Em Emalb]

"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]."

So, everyone who already wanted them had downloaded them, they come with XP and OS X, and people were abusing them.--Damned OSS hippies ;) (joking, joking, out down the chair)

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.

Re:hmmm

[spotter]

well, here's Bill Gates denying it.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180#fn*

Re:hmmm

[HiThere]

I read the quote in InfoWorld a decade or more ago. I believe that at the time the largest PC that IBM sold was 64K, so he was saying "We won't need more than 10 times as much memory as the largest PC sold." He was wrong, but it wasn't silly. I suspect that he assumed that by the time computers got that large (if ever) that the OS would have been replaced. He certainly didn't expect to be running the same OS on a 64 bit machine with multi-megabytes of RAM. And neither did anyone else. Not on a personal computer. That would have been just silly...

And the chairman of IBM acutally did say that there wouldn't ever be a world market for more than a few hundered (I forget the precise number) computers.

It depends on what point you are making whether or not the quote is fair. If you are pointing to the inability of people to forcast the rate of technological expansion, it's quite fair. If you are saying "This is evidence of how silly he is", you just prove that you don't know you history.

Re:hmmm

[subsolar2]

The article also mentions that "most" the fonts are included with all version of windows 98 or newer with the exception of Trebuchet MS, Andale Mono and Gorgia. I guess I'll have to modify my web pages so that they require thoes fonts, have a decent linux alternative font, and then finally a lineprinter font. Finally maybe top it off with a "click here if the font's look crappy" link that points to MS's old page.

subsolar

Re:hmmm

[HiThere]

Whee! I hadn't dared even guess that he had estimated such a small number. And he was no slouch at technological estimates, either!

Anyone else see the irony?

[CBNobi]

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.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

And yet, Slashdot, the site that posted this news, is still using Times New Roman.. ironic

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.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[CBNobi]

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.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[Hrunting]

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?"

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[bziman]

And yet, Slashdot, the site that posted this news, is still using Times New Roman.. ironic

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

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[Reality Master 101]

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.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

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.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[Tony-A]

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.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[pyrotic]

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.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[MaxVlast]

Comic Sans is an infection that has taken over amateur design. I'm glad if anything is done that retards its corruption of just another person.

When I see business signs nowadays in Comic Sans, I want to go in and lecture the storeowners.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[MaxVlast]

I use those three 95% of the time. They're just beautiful, versatile fonts. I'll use other things for decorative text or titles, but Times and Helvetica are the bulk of what I use in design.

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[God! Awful]

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

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

... I seriously want to know why people have moved away from TNR.

It's horrible to read on-screen because it's a serifed font. Even if it is designed with the screen in mind, it's still harder to read than a sans-serif font.

As for the look. It's been used so much that is just boring to a lot of people (BTW for some reason that hasn't happened to Verdana yet).

Re:Anyone else see the irony?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

It's horrible to read on-screen because it's a serifed font. Even if it is designed with the screen in mind, it's still harder to read than a sans-serif font.

OK, that's reasonable. I disagree -- the sans-serif seem to hurt my eyes after a very short while -- but I'm just a traditionalist at heart. :)

As for the look. It's been used so much that is just boring to a lot of people

This is a less good reason. I like TNR precisely because it is boring. When I surf to a page -- or open one up in dead trees -- I want to focus on the content, not the font. Fnacy fonts tend to distract and make gleaning information a chore... They're fine for headings, etc., as visual hooks but they can't stand the long haul on actual information presentation.

BTW, I don't mean to label all non-TNR fonts as "fancy" and hence useless. A lot of them are fine, too.

LICENSE

[jmd!]

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

Re:LICENSE

[erikdalen]

They're already distributed here

(An easy way to install Microsoft's TrueType core fonts on linux)

/Erik

Re:LICENSE

[mpe]

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".

Re:LICENSE

[justsomebody]

AS I read EULA of the fonts there are two conclusions.

1. Distributed packages must be exe files.
2. Everything else is not important.

It's truth that MS has included part where they have rights to cancel license, but only to a vendor that doesn't respect distribution demands. That means "Original packages".

About the place, sourceforge or freshmeat would be much better than some personal page.

So making a Wine installer and redistributing original packages is what it should be done. MS hasn't specified cancelation of the package, except in terms of wrong distribution. RPMs, DEBs are excluded.

Conclusion, it's time to make a nice sourceforge page, where are all packages in the correct and demanded form. Make a nice .sh installer that downloads specific web font installer (that extracts and installs trough wine) and installs them to a system.

EASY! I'm starting it already. But then again...
Is there something what I'm missing or it's time to start this project? That would be appreciated.

Re:LICENSE

[mi]

Conclusion, it's time to make a nice sourceforge page, where are all packages in the correct and demanded form. Make a nice .sh installer that downloads specific web font installer (that extracts and installs trough wine) and installs them to a system.

FreeBSD has just that since 2001/01/20. And it seems, Debian had the same idea, but pulled it out for some reason -- overreaction?

Re:LICENSE

[jareds]

And it seems, Debian had the same idea, but pulled it out for some reason -- overreaction?

It doesn't look like they pulled anything. The package msttcorefonts is still there, but it runs a script that tries to download the fonts from www.microsoft.com, which naturally fails.

Other distro

[mfos.org]

The familiar distro (for ARM based PDAs, mostly iPaq's) counted on this heavily I believe, for your handheld.

Not to Nitpick...

[Archie Steel]

...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?

Re:Not to Nitpick...

[DavidBrown]

Taking the original font, modifying it, and publishing it is a violation of copyright - the new font would be a derivative work, well beyond the boundary of "fair use".

The solution here is to adopt any of a number of true-type fonts that are in the public domain. I had a CD-ROM of them once, and I still use "blackletter686.ttf", a sort of olde english font, to make the words "Last Will and Testament"
look more official looking.

Re:Not to Nitpick...

[MaxVlast]

So add three times as many letters that are just little squares? "Well, your honor, the original font had sixty characters. This one has 241 characters, so it's more than 25% changed."

Re:Not to Nitpick...

[jonadab]

> ...but Georgia is the serif font, and Verdana is the sans serif

Err, I wrote the article early in the morning. Sorry about
that. I do understand what serifs are.

Re:Not to Nitpick...

[Tet]

I believe it's aimed squarely at Codeweaver's Crossover programs, making them less usable by removing the possibility of downloading fonts.

Yes, I agree completely. It was obvious for some time that they were specifically trying to exclude Unix and MacOS users from using these fonts. That's why they released them as self extracting Windows executables (and unlike most, they're not just a zip file with an executable header). The license specifically says that redistribution is allowed if, and only if, they're in the original, unmodified archive. What they'd overlooked was the ability for other systems to extract the archives via Windows emulation, and now that's become a reality, they're doing what they can to stop it. I don't believe they're particularly worried about the spread of these fonts in themselves. However, as an enabling mechanism that allows Crossover Office to potentially take Windows revenue away from them, then yes, they're worried. As they should be -- I've been using Crossover Office at work, and it certainly has the potential to be the key piece in the jigsaw that make Linux a viable corporate desktop alternative. That is something that will have Redmond very worried indeed...

Re:Not to Nitpick...

[Archie Steel]

I'll repost this because the original poster is an AC, and therefore some people might miss it:

"The fonts are available at Sourceforge, the page author says that per the EULA this is OK, so all Codeweavers needs to do is adjust their download procedure to point to the new site."

Cool!

Font Editor

[sunya]

PFAEdit is a sophisticated graphical editor for designing and editing Postscript fonts.

Still available

[Da Schmiz]

CrossOver Office uses this to install necessary MS fonts, and the office-support mailing list has been buzzing about this lately.

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.

Re:Still available

[madburn]

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?

Isn't redistribution permitted?

[Soft]

According to /usr/share/doc/msttcorefonts/READ_ME!.gz on Debian Woody machines:

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.
[...]
Software Transfer. You may permanently transfer all of your rights
under this EULA, provided the recipient agrees to the terms of this EULA.

Can't this package be redistributed verbatim for free?

Re:Isn't redistribution permitted?

[RickHunter]

Yes, it can. Debian removed the package that downloaded them from Microsoft's site. (thus exploiting a loophole in the license) It probably will not be distributing them because of that "not be distributed for profit" clause. However, numerous non-profit groups can, according to that license, still distribute them at will.

This is, of course, assuming that Microsoft doesn't have a right to unilaterally change the terms of that license at any time. I'm assuming they don't, but one can never be sure in the modern American legal system.

Of course, this sidesteps the main issue. There needs to be good, nice-looking, Free fonts usable by any and everyone who wants to.

Re:Isn't redistribution permitted?

[orkysoft]

Debian is a non-profit organisation.

Re:Isn't redistribution permitted?

[ivan256]

If they had specified such in the "Termination" Section of the license, then they might have been able to get away with it, but they explicitly list only a single cause for termination:

Microsoft may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA.

Unfortunatly I don't still have the original archive that I acquired the fonts in, so I cannot redistribute my copy. I'm sure there's an archive somewhere though.

I've publicly praised Microsoft on multiple occations for making these fonts available. It's one of the few things they've actually done that truly helped web standards. Technically I don't blame then for pulling the fonts, as I would be unhappy if somebody was violating the license of some of my software as well, however if these fonts were truly to acomplish what Microsoft said they were for then they would have had a more favorable (Perhaps BSD like) license for them in the first place. Well, so much for there being one great thing I could say about Microsoft. I guess now I can move on to unilateral contempt.

Re:Isn't redistribution permitted?

[Fluffy the Cat]

Debian is a non-profit organisation

Yeah, but not everyone who distributes Debian is.

Re:Isn't redistribution permitted?

[RickHunter]

Hey, I think its great that they made these available. Good-looking fonts for free, and promoting standards at the same time! It would've been even better if they'd put it under the BSD license, but then they wouldn't have been able to throw that "non-commercial" bit in there.

Also, note that no-one was actually violating the spirit. None of the Linux distros actually distributed them, and Debian merely included a package to download them for you. (Which was probably what they were objecting to)

Finally, there are several archives linked to in the discussion. Even with my filter at 4+, I managed to catch them.

Re:Isn't redistribution permitted?

[RickHunter]

Exactly. Debian, I believe, follows mostly the same definition of free as RMS and the GNU and FSF types. So it has to be possible to distribute every package in the main body of their distro freely, even if you're charging for it.

OTOH, I don't see what stops them throwing the fonts into nonfree...

Is TrueType 'free'?

[qurob]

Or is it adobe property?

linux people won't make/use fonts (or anything else) unless everything about them is free

Tools for you

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Heh

[ErikZ]

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.

Re:Heh

[stubear]

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.

Re:Heh

[Dr. Awktagon]

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.

Re:Heh

[reallocate]

>> ...have to open their minds and listen.

Nicely put, and here's hoping for a bit more common sense and less religiosity. For whatever reasons, many in the Linux and open source communities seem to think ease of use and desktop design issues are beneath them. Of course they aren't, and the 25-year history of Unix prior to Linux testifies to the basic unmarketablility of the command shell as a pleasing desktop for all but the already converted.

I dropped Linux as my desktop last month because, even with the MS fonts, it was just too bleedin' hard on my esyes.

Re:Heh

[HiThere]

I've designed reasonable fonts on the Mac. Of course, I had a nice tool (Fontographer, I believe).

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 ... 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.)

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.")

Re:Heh

[dh003i]

Please, your telling me it'd take years for a Linux group to design replacements for industry standards, like Courrier, Times, and Arial? And don't be mistaken, those are really the only fonts commonly used -- like 99% of the time.

Re:Heh

[eyeball]

Nicely put, and here's hoping for a bit more common sense and less religiosity. For whatever reasons, many in the Linux and open source communities seem to think ease of use and desktop design issues are beneath them. Of course they aren't, and the 25-year history of Unix prior to Linux testifies to the basic unmarketablility of the command shell as a pleasing desktop for all but the already converted.

Nicely put as well. I watched the unix desktop evolve over the last decade, and have put serious effort into using every window manager and desktop system that came out, but found all unusable in one way or another. I now use CDE under Solaris, but it still has design problems (although it only smells of design-by-committee, whereas newer desktop systems like KDE and Gnome completely stink of it).

It saddens me when systems like Gnome and KDE, with some very impressive technology behind them, fall victim to kitchen-sink syndrome. We're left with a complex unstable over-compensating system that lacks any consistancy, and ends up overwhelming even more advanced users.

All I ask for is a unix front-end with some simple features: copy&paste works consistantly; consistant keyboard short-cuts (i.e.: CTRL-V *always* pastes, not sometimes); doesn't have a million configuration options; smooth anti-aliased fonts *everywhere*; one that doesn't require special hardware (I'm thinking os-x); and double-bufferd screen drawing (that's all just off the top of my head). And more importantly, a unix front-end that gives all that without having to specially compile my own version of a window/desktop manager (or even a kernel!), hunt down and compile additional code, spend hours on google trying to figure out how to edit a text file, or in general be a dedicated elite linux/unix user that knows every single project on sourceforge and every single thing about linux/unix. I'd rather spend my time actually doing the work rather than enabling myself to do the work.

/vent

Re:Heh

[Nugget]

Another problem is that you need license which is like a gpl for fonts

What's wrong with public domain? That fits all your criteria and we've had it as an option forever.

Re:Heh

[Chasuk]

I dropped Linux as my desktop last month because, even with the MS fonts, it was just too bleedin' hard on my esyes [sic].

I concur. I do run Linux on a second box which I can switch to via a KVM, but I only use Linux sporadically (and never when I am surfing the web) because it is so fucking ugly that it gives me a headache.

If that problem were fixed (and, yes, I would donate money towards it fixing) Linux would be my primary OS.

Re:Heh

[Chasuk]

All I ask for is a unix front-end with... smooth anti-aliased fonts *everywhere*

Ditto: if, or when, that happens, Linux will become my primary OS.

Re:Heh

[Hanno]

I'm quite surprised about your comment. Did anybody actually tell you that you have to contribute design to OSS projects? Is anybody ungrateful that you don't? Really? I certainly don't care if you contribute or not.

If you don't like the design of an OSS project, and you know a way to improve it, the only one to change it is you. Scratch your own itch.

Our hobbies are our jobs and vice versa. We get paid doing something we truly love to do.

So do "we". Really, where's the difference to "us programmers"? You make a rather strict distinction between "your" camp and "our" camp, however I see no difference at all.

I get paid for programming. I work with several professional designers who get paid for design. Get paid a lot. These guys know nothing about programming, but they enjoy doing web, usability and gui design. They also contribute to some free projects. From time to time. When they enjoy the project. For the same reasons as myself when I contribute.

The biggest problem of most OSS projects is they do not make themselves available to people like me.

"We" do. There are people "like you" who contribute. "We" listen to them. "They" listen to us.

If you want to help, go ahead, do it. Don't complain in advance that noone will listen to you before you tried.

Nobody is stopping you from joining a mailing list and giving your design contributions. Nobody. If you want to contribute, start today.

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.

People in OSS don't work for free just for vanity points. It's a part of the motivation, but it's not the reason.

Most OSS projects provide basic infrastructure. OS kernels, web servers, DNS servers, mail servers, GUI frameworks aren't exactly sexy projects. These things are initiated because someone wanted it and others helped because they saw a way to improve it according to their own needs: "Scratching an itch." If design is your itch, scratch it, for the benefit of others.

Re:Heh

[dh003i]

God, some people are fucking DENSE.

We don't need a zillion fucking fonts. Get over yourself. Most of these great fonts you people come up with are stuff we NEVER use. I've never used anything other than Times (New Roman), Arial, and Courrier (New). We, the Linux community, or most of us anyways, don't need new fonts from scratch. We need standard fonts which you see in every newspaper, article, letter, or webpage. That is: Times New Roman, Courrier New, and Arial. That's it. We don't need "font families". We need THREE fonts, which are standard and pretty damn easy to create.

In case you still haven't gotten it, NO we don't need those fancy unreadable cursive fonts; NO, we don't need those fancy unreadable English fonts. Well we need is to get THREE freaking fonts to be TrueTyped and antialiased nicely, so they scale well: Times, Courrier, and Arial. These fonts have been around for ages, so any copyrights or patents or whatever on them ran out. Courrier is basically typewriter font; typewriters have been arround for ages, so that font's available to us. Times New Roman is basically newspaper/article font, which has also been around for ages: again, no copyrights/patents apply anymore. Arial is a no-frills wont with no fancy angles, so its pretty easy to create from scratch.

Re:Heh

[stubear]

As I am a designer, not a programmer, I have to rely on others to implement the GUI designs I come up with. My experience to date has been rather sad to say the least. There is a "my camp"/"your camp" distinction because most of the developers I've offered my services to have snubbed me or flat out ignored me. So be it. But don't whine when your apps look like crap and are about as user friendly as punch cards on an old Honeywell or Data General main frame.

So far the OBOS group has been fairly receptive to the overall GUI look, though nothing is set in stone yet, but the functionlity has been an uphill battle. Some developers want things one way, some want things another and yet even more don't want any real advancement in GUIs for the OS at all. Until OSS groups learn to set firm project guidelines and milestones for these goals you will find help such as my own few and far between, if at all.

Re:Heh

[FunkyChild]

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.

Re:Heh

[frankie]

All I ask for is a unix front-end with some simple features: copy&paste works consistantly; consistant keyboard short-cuts (i.e.: CTRL-V *always* pastes, not sometimes); doesn't have a million configuration options; smooth anti-aliased fonts *everywhere*; one that doesn't require special hardware (I'm thinking os-x); and double-bufferd screen drawing

I really wouldn't say that an iBook counts as "special hardware"; the term "cool hardware" is often used. Perhaps you meant to say "runs on commodity x86 PC". But you didn't.

Re:Heh

[nathanh]

The biggest problem of most OSS projects is they do not make themselves available to people like me.

Then why don't you take the initiative. Write some guidelines. Discuss an existing application. Offer an idea for improvement. Draw a new interface. Create a new font. But please don't point fingers at everybody else for not "making themselves available" to you. It's not somebody elses job to motivate you: that's YOUR job.

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.

You have to speak before somebody can listen.

Re:Heh

[WNight]

As someone else mentioned, I don't think we need a ton of fonts. 99% of people are going to be happy with a times, courier, and arial (and maybe a few basic others.) The people who want more are likely to be buying font packs anyways.

How much would it cost, at a guess, to hire a font designed it make a fairly basic Arial, or Times clone? Nothing weird or fancy.

On a related topic, I vote for the death penalty for font designers who make letters and numbers look alike. (To keep out the bias, I also really hate it when you run a program from the console and it spits out 100+ lines of status - how about the ten most important lines, dump the rest to foo_log.txt ...)

Re:No tools for making fonts

[sunya]

PFAEdit is a sophisticated graphical editor for designing and editing Postscript fonts. It has tools for specifiying hints for the glyphs, and even has a autohint function that will determine and set hints for you automatically. Truetype hints, called instructions, while not supported at design stage, PFAEdit will try to convert PS hints to TT instructions. But yes, font design is an art and a science.

not to nitpick, or anything...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Linux Font Project

[erikdalen]

Something to checkout for people wanting free fonts: Linux Font Project

/Erik

Re:Linux Font Project

[gnugnugnu]

> Something to checkout for people wanting free fonts: Linux Font Project

Note they are working on bitmap fonts, not truetype fonts.

Re:Linux Font Project

[jonadab]

Bitmap fonts were great, back in the day when everyone used
the same screen resolution. These days, however, we really
need scalable fonts.

Re:Linux Font Project

[vidarh]

variable width != truetype. The variable width fonts are PCF fonts, which means they are still bitmaps.

the one good thing about the MS monopoly...

[mlas]

...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!

Re:the one good thing about the MS monopoly...

[Reality Master 101]

And when you come out of your ivory tower, you might notice that the default font on everyone's browser is the sucky, hard-to-read times new roman. Yes, theoretically everyone change their font to a better style, but in practice no one does (or even knows that they can). Therefore, since I want my customers to have a better experience on my web site, I choose to use a better site.

Besides, nothing stops the browser from overriding my font selections.

Re:the one good thing about the MS monopoly...

[mlas]

I feel a need to clear some things up here:

You shouldn't be forcing people to use a perticular font on a web site in any case whatsoever.

I don't force anything. CSS font selections are at best a suggestion,and if the font I've suggested doesn't exist, the default renders anyway. But 99% of the audience never changes their default font, which is Times New Roman, and which is not always the right font for the job.

That's a decision to be left to the client's renderer.

If it means that much to you, most modern browsers have the option to let local settings override the designer's settings. Edit your preferences and enjoy! Most people don't choose their default font, and don't care if the font changes as long as the design is usable (and yes, I have the data to back this up from usability studies I've done).

If you absolutely MUST dictate a precise font face, for a specific purpose, then create a graphic of what you want, and use that.

And that's more friendly how? Plain HTML text is searchable, cut-and-pasteable, and accessible in web readers for the blind, etc. Text-as-graphics is a last resort that should only be used for logos and such.

What about sight-impaired people who need HUGE fonts in order to read a web page? If you've forced 12 pt blahfoobar, they're screwed.

Who said anything about forcing a font size? We're talking about font face, which you can specify while leaving default sizes intact. And when using CSS and the em unit, you can scale an entire page relative to the viewer's base font size. In fact this is another argument against text-in-graphics, as graphics always render as fixed pixel sizes, and limit the scalablity of designs.

And on the subject of font sizes, sometimes there's a need to make a super-small piece of text, as in legal copy or photo captions, things that are required to be on a page by law but will be read by few if any of the users.

As was noted in another post, Verdana was designed by Matthew Carter (the same typographer who designed Bell Gothic for legibility in the cramped confines of telephone books) specifically for legibility on screen. It's a welcome alternative to Times New Roman. Typography textbooks will tell you that serif fonts are more legible in body copy, but that assumes enough resolution to render the serifs! Current screens set to 800x600 don't compare to the resolution of print which can commonly run up to 3250dpi (that's a 1000x difference when comparing number of dots per page).

Having a font on demand (Verdana) with a minimum of visual crap around the edges is a valuable tool in the design arsenal.

Get an old CorelDRAW! CD

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Get an old CorelDRAW! CD

[Hanno]

Any version from 3.0 onwards will have 600+ excellent quality TrueType and .pfb fonts

I'm neither a designer nor a typography expert, but even I remember that those 600+ excellent quality fonts where quite crappy for the most part. Some of them nice on paper, but almost all of them awful on screen.

Re:Get an old CorelDRAW! CD

[jsse]

Sorry for my ignorant question, but how may I import those fonts for my word processing use in Openoffice on Linux? I'm planning to migrate office's Chinese word processing tasks to Linux, but I'm stuck with lacking of decent Chinese fonts in Linux. :/

not TrueType, OpenType

[khuber]

OpenType succeeds TrueType and Type1 fonts. It's a better format.

opentype overview

-Kevin

Re:not TrueType, OpenType

[Andy_R]

Ok, so the open source community needs fonts, and a large font manufacturer has a font format it wants to push.

Am I the only one putting two and two together here?

Web sites shouldn't specify fonts.

[cduffy]

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.

Re:Web sites shouldn't specify fonts.

[cduffy]

How's that? Funny how Slashbots decry people who don't follow the W3C standards then, when they do use things specified (until now) in those self-same standards they say it's broken.

Eh? I certainly can have it both ways.

Failure to comply with standards is one form of brokenness -- but not the only form of brokenness. A piece of software which (for instance) complies perfectly with K&R's coding standards and Apple's (or Microsoft's, or GNOME's, or someone's) UI standards and still, despite all this standards compliance or multiple levels, be hard to use.

So it is with web pages. As another example: Animated GIFs are standards-compliant too, but overusing them is no less broken for that fact.

I know I'm ignorant, but...

[ColGraff]

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?

Re:I know I'm ignorant, but...

[Chris Johnson]

Look at MacOSX sometime.

Microsoft is _nothing_ to Apple in terms of mastering this stuff (and the MS fonts are pretty uninspired considering that there are thousands of Adobe Postscript fonts as good or better).

Yes, it does indeed matter, but what gives anyone the idea that Microsoft is the heavyweight in THIS field? All their stuff is toys compared to professional typography, publishing and layout. Odds are you wouldn't even be USING Truetype for professional publishing.

And if I'm not mistaken, doesn't Linux already have Postscript? As in 'ghostscript'?

Just as a sidenote

[Zwei]

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.

Corefonts project

[jensend]

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."

Re:Corefonts project

[Michael Wardle]

On my Red Hat Linux 7.3 box I also had to change my X server to use the local font server rather than local font paths.
I did this by changing the "FontPath" entry in /etc/X11/XF86Config to "unix:-1".

To make remote hosts use the new fonts, you'll need to enable remote access to your X font server by following the steps here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XDMCP-HOWTO/procedure.ht ml

You can access the remote font server using XFree86/Cygwin by using a command such as this:
X -query remotehost -fp "tcp/remotehost:7100".

Also, step 4 (installing the source RPM) didn't seem to work for me. I found it worked to extract the SRPM using a command such as:
rpm2cpio msttcorefonts-1.2.1.src.rpm > corefonts.cpio
cpio --extract corefonts.cpio

Except for these minor details for my setup, I'm amazed at how easy this procedure makes the installation of some decent TrueType fonts.

Yes, I've already passed this information on to the contact listed for the Corefonts project. :-)

This thing is something I have never understood...

[jukal]

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.

Covered by OSNews already

[andred]

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.

Commission Matthew Carter to best his own Verdana

[bostoncello]

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.

Microsoft Exploits Free Software's Elitism

[ChaoticCoyote]

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.

Re:Microsoft Exploits Free Software's Elitism

[Wesley Felter]

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.

Re:Microsoft Exploits Free Software's Elitism

[Shelled]

Destroyer of Order and Chaos

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.

An education in font terms woudl be nice first

[stubear]

"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.

Re:An education in font terms woudl be nice first

[EJB]

Lighten up. Many fonts are designed for a very specific purposes, like ads or flyers. There are monospaced fonts that have a techy or old-fashioned typewriter 'feel', and you see them plenty in print for those purposes.

And for printing source code in O'Reilly books, of course.

Next you'll be posting that Dingbats isn't good for printing novels. ;)

Re:An education in font terms woudl be nice first

[stubear]

I stand corrected. For printing source code in books and manuals it is perhaps a better choice than a proportional font :)

Now everyone run and hide. Someone on /. has admitted to being wrong.

Re:An education in font terms woudl be nice first

[jonadab]

First off, I did confuse Verdana with Georgia, but it was early in the morning...

> Fixed-width fonts mean the spacing between characters is equal.

Really? I thought it meant every character was a _different_ width... </sarcasm>

> there are no mostly-sans font types

Andale Mono is mostly sans-serif (meaning, most of the characters don't have serifs). However, certain select characters have serifs, in order to distinguish them from otherwise similar characters. Compare the following chars: Il1!| O0 If any two of them look the same, your font fails to adequately make all the distinctions it should. This won't matter for the end user doing nothing but word processing, but for many uses it is totally unacceptable. (Granted, most of these uses are geeky, but they still matter.) Fonts that accomodate this via select serifs but omit serifs on most letters are mostly-sans.

Furthermore, most of the uses that require every character to be distinct also absolutely require a fixed-width font. If you don't understand why a fixed-width font might be needed, then you don't understand source-code indentation. This is why we need a good quality mostly-sans fixed-width font, similar to Andale Mono. Alternately, we could use a serif fixed font like Courier New, except that serifs are ugly for large blocks of regular-sized text. Don't get me wrong, they're great for headlines and stuff, but I do NOT want to look at sixty consecutive lines of seriffed text. (Yes, I know the publishing industry does it all the time, but that's one of the reasons I prefer reading stuff on-screen to a physical book. The other reason is of course the search feature. The only redeeming feature of dead-tree books is that you can take them to the bathtub or wherever, conveniently.) The reason many fixed fonts are mostly-sans is because the need to make every char distinct and the need to make them line up happen to both be important for many of the same uses. You say fixed fonts should only be used on screen, but that's preposterous. Any text that needs to be fixed-width on the screen needs to be fixed-width on paper, too. This includes almost all source code, all ASCII art of more than one line, and a large amount of what is posted to usenet, as well as a lot of the email that geeks exchange with one another. (End-user email can probably be shown in a proportional font without problems.)

One last thing: if you are about to post a reply advocating tab stops for program indentation, please first read this example that I posted to usenet some time back, explaining why tab stop indentation is inadequate for many situations.

Re:fucking linux hippies

[fmaxwell]

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?

Now, for a limited time only...

[Mulletproof]

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.

Dont dance with the devil.

[miffo.swe]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Take that! foot of mine

[Tablizer]

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."

Serif vs Sans-Serif

[hithro]

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.

Re:Serif vs Sans-Serif

[MaxVlast]

And that's part of the reason that non-professional fonts are going to be really hard to do well. I don't much like the tone of the previous poster, but a beautiful font is a work of art on the order of a marble sculpture, not a fingerpainting. What concerns me is that if the community is flooded with really bad Times knockoffs, people won't know the difference (people are amazingly font-ignorant,) and we'll be flooded by some absolutely awful-looking work (OpenOffice, etc.) that make Linux users looks like hacks.

Re:Serif vs Sans-Serif

[MaxVlast]

Alas, the Microsoft Office rendering engine Mac OS X is sadly disappointing as well. Especially when you look at the Cocoa text objects and their absolutely beautiful typographics. I'd be embarrassed if my company was asking for money in exchange for products whose text and other associated aesthetics are so plainly ugly compared to what the bundled tools give you for free.

what's to stop someone from making an andale copy?

[SystemOfTheAnimal]

i've been a designer for the better part of ten years, and have therefore been exposed to a lot of type and talk about type. it's my understanding that you can't copyright or otherwise protect the actual curves (the letterforms themselves) in a font, but only the name. i believe this is accurate, because if you look at those lame corel "100000 fonts for $4" clip art packages, you'll see lots of blantantly deriviative fonts with slight changes, like "universal," which is quite obviously univers with a name change. if you ask me, this is a sad state of legal affairs, but it is the status quo whether i like it or not.

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...

Re:fucking linux hippies

[fmaxwell]

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.

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:

Anyone can download and install these fonts for their own use.
Designers can specify the fonts within their Web pages. Our guide to specifying fonts in Web pages explains how to do this.

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.

Re: pay for professional fonts?

[King_TJ]

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.

Arial Unicode MS Equally Important

[Boiotos]

What's being overlooked here, but is of at least as great importance, is MS's concurrent withdrawl of Arial Unicode MS, a 27 Mb unicode font with an unequalled combination of beauty and coverage that Cyberbit can't touch. Ancient Greek, for instance, looks great in arialuni, and with it installed, Mozilla would be sure to render just about any unicode encountered. This page provides mandrake rpms for it.

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.

Re:Arial Unicode MS Equally Important

[Jacco de Leeuw]

This page [techviet.com] provides mandrake rpms for it.

Did Microsoft use the same EULA for these fonts? If so, packaging them into a tar ball may not be allowed. Someone better post the original .exe files...

Re:Arial Unicode MS Equally Important

[Boiotos]

Answering my own question...

Using the Wayback machine trick outlined above, I was able to get a copy of the original ariuni .exe file. Below is the EULA, which is written as a supplement to that of applicable software. The definition of the latter includes "Microsoft Office" (no version specified), whereas the MS website now stipulates that the font is for Publisher 2000 users only.

Thus, to expand on my comments above, there is an even more dire need for a OS'd and free prorportional TrueType (or better) font with as broad a unicode coverage as possible. The only alternative I know of is Cyberbit; Bitstream's website says it is now a commerical font, but you can download it from netscape's ftp site.

Arial Unicode MS EULA excerpt follows:

SUPPLEMENTAL END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR MICROSOFT SOFTWARE ("SUPPLEMENTAL EULA") (c) 2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. IMPORTANT: READ CAREFULLY - These Microsoft software product components, including any "online" or electronic documentation ("Components") are subject to the terms and conditions of the agreement under which you have licensed the applicable Microsoft product ("Product") described below (each an "End User License Agreement" or "EULA") and the terms and conditions of this Supplemental EULA. .... NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID EULA FOR ANY "PRODUCT" (I.E., MICROSOFT OFFICE, MICROSOFT PUBLISHER, AND ANY MICROSOFT PRODUCTS THAT INCLUDE MICROSOFT PUBLISHER AS A COMPONENT PRODUCT), YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY OR OTHERWISE USE THE COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.

Because it is hard work

[TecraMan]

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.

Designing a font, many many hours of hardwork

[ebunga]

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.

Re:fucking linux hippies

[spanky555]

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.

Reliability is important...

[ChaoticCoyote]

...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.

Re:Reliability is important...

[brianvan]

The parent author did not say that free software was not sufficient for certain tasks... rather, the author stated that better software for certain tasks is only available on Windows and not at all available on Linux.

This is a major problem with Linux. Many people can learn how to use the OS, but they can't deal with the fact that much, if not most, of the software written for Linux is not as functional or user-friendly as Windows and Mac equivalents - in a very general sense.

Basically, the elitism is on the Linux side when it comes to programs that work well for most people. That "elitism" may be purely unintentional (well, some people think that's the way it should be, but I digress) but it still presents the problem that Linux cannot become popular for merely being reliable, virtuous, and free. A screwy metaphor: Condoms are generally reliable, virtuous, and free (through some outlets) - it doesn't mean that people prefer using them in all situations.

Here's the EULA for andale32.exe:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

did the BSA call billy?

[thogard]

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....

Re:Fonts and copyrights

[Etcetera]

That's correct. AFAICR, Apple had a similar issue when it first came out with the Macintosh back in 1984. Of course, the Mac was the first computer to accurately display fonts on screen (WYSIWYG) so it needed to be able to display fonts appropriately.

Adobe at the time had the rights to fonts like Times, Helvetica, and Courier.

Apple, since it didn't want to/couldn't license the proper fonts themselves, decided to come up with its own version of these fonts. Thus begat the infamous "city" fonts of Apple old: New York (substitute for Times), Geneva (substitute for Helvetica), and Monaco (substitute for Courier)

There was even an option in the print dialog box for a long time that would automatically substitute the "real" version of the font when printed (since the LaserWriters had Times/Helvetica/Courier pre-installed). This became a problem later on though when the TrueType/Type 1 wars occured. The fonts weren't identical, so the spacing when printed would be different than what was shown on screen.

And here's a general FAQ about typography: http://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_28.htm

MOD PARENT UP!

[Etcetera]

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/!!

msttcorefonts Debian package

[Eric Sharkey]

I'm the maintainer of the msttcorefonts Debian package. This package has not been pulled (at least not yet).

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 .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.

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 .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. ;)

No, TrueType is not free

[yerricde]

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.

Anyone who uses Comic Sans..

[l-ascorbic]

...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.

No re-packaging permitted

[yerricde]

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.

Re:Fonts and copyrights

[spectecjr]

If I've overlooked something with regards to copyright law regarding typefaces, I'll appreciate all corrections.

Truetype fonts also contain code for hinting purposes. So they're not purely font data - each one also contains a hand crafted computer program.

Thus, typically, font foundries copyright the hinting logic, but they can't currently copyright the shape of their font.

Simon

In environments where you can't use <table>

[yerricde]

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.

Replacement for Comic Sans

[DragonMagic]

Both free-as-in-without-money and commercial Comic fonts here:

http://www.blambot.com/

Definitely much better than Comic Sans.

Funny...

[mstyne]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:fucking linux hippies

[fmaxwell]

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.

Re:OpenOffice fonts

[MaxVlast]

I think you missed my point: If the distros are flooded by crummy fonts, people will use them. In OpenOffice, ApplixWare, KOffice, etc. What they will produce will look crummy, and Linux will look unprofessional.

FYI, Verdana = sans-serif, Georgia = serif

[Smallest]

it's nice to use big words, but it's even nicer to use them correctly.

-c

Re:This thing is something I have never understood

[jukal]

Hehe :) This defnitely seems like the best way of squeezing insightful comments out from /. readers :) I promise, I wont do it anymore :)

Here's a Tutorial I Wrote

[Tom7]

Making really nice fonts is tough (even after making 65, I still don't really have the patience to make ones that are appropriate for large bodies of text!). But there's no reason why we shouldn't have more people making fonts. Check out my tutorial,

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/makefont/

Key Point about Andale Mono: Zero and Oh!

[IvyMike]

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...)

Re:good free fonts: an oxymoron

[silentbozo]

Quite true. TrueType is incredibly difficult to tame - I would rather just design the bitmaps myself and have them subbed in at the right sizes, than to have the TrueType engine try and make sense of the glyph hints that are generated by commercially available editing programs.

What most people have to understand is that desiging a TrueType font is a 2 step process:

designing the character set, which is a whole discipline unto itself, concerning matters such as proportion, balance, readability, and style. Most designers can do this.

and:

drawing the curves and programming the hints for a TrueType program that can represent the original design as faithfully and as legibly as possible under as many conditions (screen and printed) as possible.

This is not easy. It is VERY hard. Whole staffs (with hardcore programmers) are dedicated to this. It is easier to deal with Type 1 implementations because the hinting there is much simpler, and primarily designed for printing only (back when printers were 300dpi). With Type 1, you deal with small print screen sizes with bitmap substitutions, which in my mind makes a lot more sense than programming a general outline with all the different possible glyph hints at every possible resolution!

Regarding substituting fonts, the most important thing to duplicate are the character spacings and general proportions. This is so you dont fsck up someone's document layout with different character spacings.

Re: OpenType != Open Source, there's still a prob.

[silentbozo]

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.

Re:Fonts and copyrights

[Gumshoe]

Of course, the Mac was the first computer to accurately display fonts on screen (WYSIWYG)

Surely, that accolade belongs to the Xerox Alto.

Actually, in the US, you can't own a font...

[silentbozo]

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.

ttfonts

[satmech]

My bride found these...

http://www.1001freefonts.com/fontfiles/main.htm

!!!

ProFont for programmers

[Colin Simmonds]

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).

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.

Re:ProFont for programmers

[IvyMike]

I don't throw this word around lightly, but... I think I might love you. ProFont looks pretty dammed sweet. Thanks!

Re:ProFont for programmers

[Decimal Dave]

ProFont is a good coding font, but unfortunately it is no longer useful in OS X. The new version of Monaco has a slash through the zero, proper Ls and Is, and has better kerning and readability than ProFont, IMHO.

linux terminal font?

[Nate Fox]

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)?

Re:linux terminal font?

[adolf]

It's still in Slack, and pops up just before the install finishes up.

It was a somewhat garish feature even Back in the Day, but I guess it does serve some a purpose when a VGA card has a particularly disgusting BIOS font.

Met no metric

[fm6]

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.

Well, yeah that's patently absurd, especially since the fonts were meant for web developers, not end users. MS wasn't just being generous -- they wanted people to write web pages with embedded fonts, thus increasing users' dependence on Internet Explorer. So they commissioned a bunch of fonts that emphasized on-screen usability, as opposed to the print-only or print-and-screen usability of most fonts.

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.

Re:Met no metric

[mccalli]

MS wasn't just being generous -- they wanted people to write web pages with embedded fonts, thus increasing users' dependence on Internet Explorer.

That's interesting. For argument's sake then, would a good way to distribute these fonts simply be to create a web page that embeds the lot? A mechanism in a browser which then offered to cache the fonts for you would then have effectively installed them for you.

Just a thought.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:fucking linux hippies

[AJWM]

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".

Gee!

[fm6]

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

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why should they?

[supabeast!]

"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.

History of typography....

[crapulent]

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.

I guess you sure told him!

[fm6]

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!

...assuming...

[Snaller]

>These fonts are still available from the
>Corefonts project [sourceforge.net]. This is
>perfectly legal and in accordance with the EULA ...assuming EULA's are legal!

Font Copyrights

[Jeff Fohl]

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)

Re:Font Copyrights

[vidarh]

You are wrong. The font files themselves are copyrighted, and the names can be trademarked. However, AFAIK you can't copyright the general look of the font, only the exact version you have created. Thus there's nothing stopping you from drawing a font that looks extremely close to a copyrighted font, but you can't copy their font data directly. (ObDisclaimer: IANAL)

Re:Font Copyrights

[vidarh]

Be as sure as you want, you are still wrong.

The post you referred to were partly right: You can't copyright typefaces in the US. But a typeface != font. A font is the implementation of a typeface - the typeface is the design, while the font is the file that describes the design.

Just as a the general concept of a word processor isn't copyrightable (it might have been patentable if there wasn't prior art), the general concept of the design of a font isn't copyrightable in the US (but it is other places).

As far as using the post you refer to as an authority - the post referred to copyright on names. That is a demonstration as good as any that the person in question doesn't know what he/she is talking about. You can't copyright a name. You may trademark it, but that's completely different.

In other words there are three levels a font designer can protect himself on, one of which doesn't apply in the US: The name, which can be trademarked, the typeface (design) which can be copyrighted outside the US, and the font (the implementation of the design) which is copyrighted everywhere.

fonts.gnu.org? You can help [long, sorry]

[Ankh]

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

Why Bitmap when X Truetype fonts are now so good?

[Nailer]

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.

Troll me, troll you

[fm6]

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.

The Scourge of Arial...

[Frogg]

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.

Re:No no no no no.....

[timeOday]

Oh give me a break. The same could be said for almost anything.

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!

Well we *don't* need more than 640K!

[fm6]

I've sure somebody did say something like this, but more along the lines, "No MS-DOS program will ever need more than 640K." And back when MS-DOS was first released (1981) that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Remember, MS-DOS was originally targeted only at processors with a 1 meg address space -- the 8088 and 8086. If you only have 1 meg to work with, it makes perfect sense to to set aside some memory for the OS (384K was way too much, but that's a minor point) and specify what's left as the permanent limit for application software. Especially when the processor puts a nasty penalty on programs that used code or data entities bigger than 64K!

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.

Desktop Linux Distros

[bruthasj]

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.

Re:OK, I have copies of almost all of those

[mosch]

that last one is the unicode version of arial.

I demand to see your web site!!!

[fm6]

Either post the URL or stop saying interesting things about it!

GIMP and other cripples

[fm6]

True, but some posters seem to think that designing scalable fonts is no harder than designing bitmap or vector graphics. There's even a link to a "Linux font project" that's only doing bitmap fonts. The crucial fact is that there's more to fonts than simple graphic design.

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!

TeX fonts?

[captaineo]

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...

Re:Eurocentrism

[captaineo]

There is actually quite a bit of "rhyme and reason" to creating a multi-thousand-character CJK font. e.g. thousands of Chinese characters are left/right pairs, so you just have to design the few basic left halves, the few basic right halves, and then automatically generate all of the combinations. Many of the simplified characters used in the PRC can also be generated automatically from their traditional counterparts. (of course some manual tweaking is going to be required, but just know that creating a 10,000 character font isn't nearly as difficult as creating 10,000 unique designs =).

Public Domain != Public Accessible

[silentbozo]

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.

archive.org

[jea6]

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/defau lt.htm

Re:Eurocentrism

[dh003i]

There are a billion people across the Pacific who use fonts that have upwards of 10,000 different characters. I find Japanese on non-commercial unixes simply unbearable, the fonts are so bad. While presumably the Chinese government is willing to design it's own fonts for its version of Linux, that does no good for the Japanese or Korean markets, and little for Chinese markets that do not use PRC characters.

And no, the fonts you mention are not damn easy to create.

I'll admit, I AM Eurocentric. I don't give a flying hoot about Chinese fonts or Japanese fonts (though Hieroglphics fonts would be pretty cool).

All I want is English fonts (and symbols), and, lets face it, English fonts pretty easy to create. Letters in the English language all have a symmetry to them. A U is just two lines connected by a semi-circle. An A is just two lines at an angle to eachother with a horizontal line connecting them. A B is just a line with two semi-circles meeting at a point, extending to the edge. A V is just two lines at an angle to eachother. A T is just a vertical line and a horizontal line. Y is just a v with a vertical line below it. X is two lines intersecting eachother. An S is just two connected semi-circles. An i is just a line with a dot above it. So, please, do not tell me it is hard to create fonts in the English language. I could create mathematical formuli to represent these characters on a TI-84. All simple (i.e., no frills) fonts are basically variations on the parameters of these mathematics, while complicated ones usually add a little extra.

Personally, I prefer very simple fonts like Arial (which is basically no frills, just simple mathematics) and Courrier; the most complicated font I like is Times New Roman.

That's English fonts. I'll admit, it does become very complicated when one is doing Symbols (i.e., Greek characters like zeta). But, never-the-less, it is still just mathematics, with a few different functions describing what the character is at its most rudimentary level; parameters could be used to modify the exact implentation of the font; i.e., how big should the loop on the gamma or alpha be could be manipulated by a variable.

The reason why people think that fonts are so hard is because they're not thinking about them in a rigorous mathematical way. They're thinking about them in a loose, sloppy way.

Think about an O as x^2/a^2 + y^2/b^2 = r^2.

Oh well

[fm6]

I was excited by this at first -- but it's yet another bitmap font. Even though it's packaged as a Truetype, apparently there's no hinting or scalability at all.

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.

How many ways can Microsoft say "Fuck You" ?

[serutan]

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?

Re:D'oh! Who forgot to preview.....

[dh003i]

Alright, its obvious your thinking about fonts in a rather sloppy way. Don't think of a font as a piece of artwork; think of it as an equation, or set of equations, in which manipulating a few variables (i.e., tilt, width, etc) can change the appearance of the font.

All English characters can be described by relatively simple equations. I'll go through a few of them:

X and V: some easy ones
y1 = |mx + b| for a = x = b
y2 = -|mx + b| for a = x = b
thickiness (in pixels) = point-size * t
where t is a user-specified value
(the absolute values insure that the lines will be in opposite directions)

Changing m will change how sharply the angles are at eachother, while changing b affects how centered the font is, and can change a font from a X to a V.

O: the easiest one
x^2/a^2 + y^2/c^2 = 1

Pretty self-explanatory there.

And so on and so forth. I'm not going to go through every example, but all of the characters of the English language are describable by relatively simple mathematics. The more complex symnbols of the Greek language such as alpha and zeta require more complicated equations. Never-the-less, almost any character (from a Eurocentric point of view) can be expressed at its most basic level by a set of mathematical formuli, where modifying the variables changes the exact implementation of the character.

In other words, duh, you don't remake the font for each point-size you can possibly need. You use an equation which will define it perfectly for every possible point size. Alternatively, one can simply scan in fonts and have a program create the formula's to represent them, then modify the parameters of those formula's to produce the desired effects.

A simple program could even be created to allow representation of what fonts are at their most basic level (i.e., what is an a, at its most basic level) and then allow the user to manipulate the variables to produce various effects.

Producing bold, italic, underline, effects is very easy once the basic font design is created; just tilt the font for italics, increase thickness for bold, and underline for underline.

Re:I'm not trying to be rude here, but...

[stubear]

Now where in my comment did I approach theproject leaders with contenpt for their efforts? Let me save you the effort of looking it up. I didn't. You mistook my open contempt for the process of OSS and many of the people leading the teams for the methods I choose to approach them. Pardon me for trying to help. In the future I'll be sure to pass because it is clear that with attitudes like yours OSS will go nowhere in the areas of user friendly UI development.

Re:This thing is something I have never understood

[Da Schmiz]

You do realize, don't you, that there is a word for that kind of activity?

really cool true type fonts...

[spike666]

and some are even free!

www.chank.com
www.fontalicious.com

Re:This thing is something I have never understood

[jukal]

I am not quite sure whether this "activity" can be considered as trolling. I aimed into getting insightful answers, and not what jargon definition says : "Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait."

Actually, I cannot instantly come up with a word from jargon, that would describe it correctly.... enlighten me?

Re:I'm not trying to be rude here, but...

[Malcontent]

" In the future I'll be sure to pass because it is clear that with attitudes like yours OSS will go nowhere in the areas of user friendly UI development."

It sounds like you were going to pass anyways. Why try to blame it on some guy on slashdot. It's obvious from reading your posts that you did not intend to contribute in any way whatsoever. Maybe somebody else will maybe nobody else will so what? That's the way this game is played.

Re:D'oh! Who forgot to preview.....

[FunkyChild]

Like I said - have you ever designed a font? Have you ever studied typography? It seems that your understanding of type is what's sloppy.

Typeface design is so much more than plugging in numbers into an equation. It's quite arrogant, not to mention misguided, to believe that there is a technological solution to every problem and the brilliant type designers of our history could have easily been replaced by a machine.

Of course fonts can be defined as mathematical equations - any piece of vector graphics can be. That doesn't make it easy for a computer to make something that's pleasing to the eye.

It requires knowledge of human perception, of optics, visual design and of linguistics. If it were so esy to write a program to design a font for you, then why haven't any of the major software companies like Microsoft of Adobe done this already? They could be making millions out of these generated font faces. The reason is that there is no simple solution. Typeface design requires an exceptional eye for detail and a lot of hard work.

And, duh, if you knew anything about fonts, you'd find that TTFs, Postscript fonts are already vector graphics and thus defined at every possible font size, however the rasterisation algorithms used don't have any knowledge of human perception, of characters and letterforms - they just know pixels. Hinting is a process that is performed at small point sizes to, in a sense, override the software and manually place the pixels for the optimum readable representation of that font. If you're volunteering to write rasterisation software that will eliminate the need for hinting, go right ahead. It's something MS, Adobe, Apple, the ghostscript people and anyone else in the business of displaying fonts on screen have decided way too hard to do, and continued to employ specialised designers to set it properly.

And yes, fonts do need to be designed for all the different bold, italic etc. variations. Open up a vector graphics program and slant a font in a serif typeface (such as Times) to the right. Then type in the same character in italics. In the italics version, the glyph will be quite different, the serifs having taken on a curved effect rather than just slanting the stems (which would make it incredibly ugly).

If you believe you can create a 'simple' program to do months, if not years of detailed type design, then go right ahead. I'd be very interested to see the results. I'm certain you'll find that it's an incredibly more complicated topic than you imagine and that *gasp* skillsets other than computer programming may actually have some use in our society.

90%+ Free Fonts are bad

[Qbertino]

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.

Don't bother with WINE

[iangoldby]

You don't need to bother with WINE. Cabextract will do the job just nicely.

Another nitpick

[Ethelred Unraed]

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

Licenses in RPM ?

[Jeppe Salvesen]

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').

Re:Fonts are not copyrightable.

[nagora]

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.

Alas for her, the US Copyright Office does not agree. See the last paragraph on this page. The fact that this flies in the face of the law as it is written is, as with DeCSS, of no importance if you end up in court. Why does America even bother having written laws when the Patent Office, Copyright Office, and every half-arsed hick judge can just make up their own laws?

In the UK typefaces are copyrighted under section 54 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 (section 54 is just about the most opaque section in the entire act).

TWW

Re:D'oh! Who forgot to preview.....

[vidarh]

And you've just demonstrated that you don't know squat about font design. Modern fonts are far more than "an equation which will define it perfectly for every possible point size", simply because while that work well for high resolution output devices (read: print), it falls apart dramatically once you're dealing with small fonts, say starting at 5-6 pixels on screen.

As for your view on italics and bold, that's bullshit as well - especially again at low resolutions. Try taking a character that is 8-9 pixels wide and increase the thickness without any hinting about exceptions...

If it's so easy, why don't you produce some truetype fonts for us?

Re:D'oh! Who forgot to preview.....

[vidarh]

That said, it would be very interesting if someone started working on an open source font design toolset. While you'd need to do manual adjustments, surely there must be quite a few tasks that can be automated to a reasonable extent, if not to eliminate all the work then at least to reduce the drudgery...

Re:No no no no no.....

[TheGreek]

You might have a point if there wasn't a glut of shitty, shitty, shitty guitarists who think that since they know a couple of chords, they're automatically musicians when all they can do is play Stairway to Heaven.

But there is.

So you lose.

Typography, like music, *does* take years to gain sufficient skill. Also, like music, there are some people who have a gift for it, and others who, no matter how hard they might try, will never be any good at it.

Re:D'oh! Who forgot to preview.....

[dh003i]

Firstly, the most readable fonts are the simplest ones: no frills. Right now, that's Arial, but fonts even simpler could be designed. And for such no-frills fonts, everything can easily be represented by equations. It should also be noted that perfect symmetry, wherever possible, as in the letter o, will always scale better than asymmetry. Without anti-aliasing, a perfect circle on your computer screen will scale down to 3 pixels by 3 pixels, and still be recognizable as a perfect circle. Such a font of perfect symmetry -- i.e., 45 degree angles, perfect circles or semi-circles -- could easily and quickly be designed. As for the curved effect of italic fonts you mentioned, this could also be represented mathamatically. This would produce a font that would be the most readable.

Secondly, as for Courrier, that's basically type-writer font, and has been around as long as type-writers. Thus, courrier fonts can't be copyrighted.

Thirdly, as for Times New Roman, that's also been around forever; its the font that was used in newspapers and journals in the early 1900's.

These are the only fonts I've claimed that anyone really needs, aside from the symbols in Greek/Roman.

As for fonts smaller than size 9/10, I have a 1600x1200 computer screen with full-scene anti-aliasing 4x4 enabled and forced in all applications, via a GeForce2 GTS. I have yet to find one font which is readable at size 8 or below.

Btw, the thought of people "owning the copyrights" to basic every-day fonts like System, Courrier, Times, and Arial is a disturbing one. Talk about carving the language up among various proprietary interests.

--All your letters belong to me!

Re:D'oh! Who forgot to preview.....

[FunkyChild]

Well go on then, let's see your program. You may want to take a look at this first. If you think that 'simple' fonts like Helvetica are made from circles and 45 degree lines, you've got another thing coming. Go and draw some like that in a vector graphics program. See how well they come out.

Such a program is a thought that people have had before, but getting a machine to do a human's job just doesn't work. The issue is that fonts aren't interpreted by machines - they're interpreted by humans, and you need a human that understands human perception and cognition in order to design something that works with a human audience.

You're absolutely wrong with regards to the copyrights on fonts - copyrights regard the implementations - you're perhaps somehow confusing this with patents. The original wood cuts or lead printing blocks' copyrights have expired - feel free to scan them and re-create the fonts from them. That's what Adobe, Linotype etc. do and it's an immense job. The font files themselves *are* copyrighted by the respective companies, because they're implementations. It's the implementation, whether it be a digital file, a printed page, or whatever that copyright applies to. If you're volunteering to digitise Stanley Morison's old Times New Roman drawings in to a digital font that's usable, readable and doesn't look like junk, then great! You could probably go and get a high paying job at Adobe with that kind of talent. As a side note, owning copyrights on fonts is hardly owning the language. They made the implementations of those fonts, so they own the copyrights. Nobody's taking away the ability for you to make your own, and nobody's taking away your pen and paper.

And by the way, 4x4 full screen antialiasing is an OpenGL feature. It'll only work when you're playing games and won't do a think to your desktop (unless you're somehow running an OpenGL window system liek MacOS Quartz Extreme). Either you really have no clue, or you're just trolling.

In any case, I'm sure everyone in the Linux community are eagerly awaiting your clear, communicative, perfectly readable machine-generated fonts, so I'll let you get back to work.

Re:No no no no no.....

[TheGreek]

Party invitations and for-sale signs are both examples of uses of printed fonts.

This discussion, however, is about fonts intended to be viewed primarily on a computer screen.

Your examples are invalid.

Re:fucking linux hippies

[fmaxwell]

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.

Theres got to be thousands of fonts

[On Lawn]

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.

Re:Theres got to be thousands of fonts

[TeddyR]

The thing is many of those fonts are 16 bit fonts (dont scale well) for windows 3.x truetype...

Re:D'oh! Who forgot to preview.....

[Royster]

This is the kind of thinking which gave us crappy looking free fonts.

Font design *is* artwork. Getting a font to look *good* at common resolutions and point sizes is hard and requires artistic skills and a hell of a lot of time.

Re:Reliability is important...Reality isn"t.

[brianvan]

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.

Hinting is hard because hinting was a bad idea

[Tom7]

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.

Re:No no no no no.....

[TheGreek]

Look at the title, retard.

"Microsoft Typography Withdraws Free Web Fonts"

People are looking for replacements.

For on-screen fonts.

Almost nice...

[fm6]

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.