Slashdot Mirror
Open Fonts For The Web -- Harder Than It Sounds
simpl3x writes "of the nytimes articles posted today, this one about new, open fonts designed for the web was by far the most interesting. Here is a link to the project site, and here is a reason why it is necessary. For all the talk of the world wide part, the basics are still very local, aren't they? It will be interesting to see how one chooses a character on a keyboard!"
corefonts.sourceforge.net
Yes, I know they're MS fonts
I don't know who Tim Bernard Lee is either. In fact, I am pretty sure he meant Tim Berners-Lee, one of the key people behind the creation of the World Wide Web.
Hardly obscure. The man has a Google Category all to himself.
Random and weird software I've written.
OK. So the previous story included the project name, and this one does not. *sigh*
This is a bit weird, since AFAIK, most complex papers involving pure math are written in TeX. If you're doing anything really complex or nonstandard with your equation layouts, there's just no substitute. TeX is not completely standardized (there are freely available addons like LaTeX and LAMS-TeX) but still....
Really, the methodology for creating the paper depended sharply on the ultimate destination (or publication). Every publisher has their own requirements for typeset, etc
True. That can get kind of painful in the real world, since style-over-substance rules there and people spend half the day dinking with fonts to get it to look "just perfect". I would expect academic journals to be both exact and sane in their requirements ("use Helvetica 14 Foo for headings, Times New Roman 12 for normal text, Computer Modern 14 for mathematical type, DVI or Quark files.") but that probably doesn't happen since academics are just as stupid as everybody else IME.
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
Ehhm
I might be a bit stupid here, but wasn't math-font-problem why the w3c came up with MathML?
Why not simply use that?
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Actually it's more complex than that.
A digital font _program_ can be copyrighted.
The name of a font as you note can be protected by trademark law, as can any other product name.
see www.typeright.org for more details
as regards cheap clones, well, sadly there're all too many of them available (and no, I'm not going to cite sources). Fonts like software are hard to create and should only be freely available if the designer so wishes (of course it helps if you get a six digit grant from the Department of the Navy and other sources as did Dr. Donald E. Knuth when he made Computer Modern).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
one line of code? sure, if you only want it to work in one browser! font embedding as it stands now is very tricky, and a huge pain in the ass. in fact, it's nearly so convoluted that it's not worth the effort. there are two major "standards" for doing it, both of them entirely different, and both of them requiring that the font you're attempting to use allow embedding. a lot of fonts have that pesky fsType value set to $0002, which means no editing, no copying, and no embedding.
:)
of course you can always change that setting with fontographer or whatever type editing prog you wish, but then you're doing something illegal and you could get fired, blah blah blah...
How mainstream is Unicode support in Linux distribs nowadays? Seems to me the problem's already been solved (in OS X and XP anyways)
/code has stripped my unicode characters from my post...
I notice that the
Many BBS's I frequent allow all kinds of multicultural strangeties such as Tibetan, Sanskrit , Mogolian... Even Mathematics!
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Read the FAQ. You can alter them as long as you change the font name.
Examples of usage are here
While you can get really cheap fonts that look like the expensive ones, the cheap ones usually aren't as good.
The reason is that types change as the resolution and size change through some sort of hinting system. In Postscript fonts, I'm not sure how this is accomplished, but I know it is accomplished and rarely copied properly. In truetype fonts, hinting is accomplished by little programs embeded in each font that rearranges the control vertices and other attributes based on the size and resolution, and perhaps other things.
This of course brings up two of my pet peeves. First is that while truetype fonts are superior to postscript fonts, creating them is also more labor intensive, so there are few really high quality providers of them.
Second, while truetype fonts are clearly better, the postscript language is so darn cool for writing programs, but you get best advantage doing so if you use real postscript fonts rather than one truetype font that has been converted at different sizes to postscript.
But anyway, to get back to the topic, the best way to copy a typeface is to print it at several sizes, and also to screen capture it at several sizes, then trace the main one (say 12pt at 300dpi) into your typeface files, then figure out how to set the hinting to approximate the other samples you took.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
In truetype, each glyph has an outline and a program that will tweak the outlines control points for best appearance at the current size. It is extremely cool, but most typeface designers aren't competant to write these programs, and the available tools aren't really that great, so people tend to use programs, like fontographer, that just supply a generic hinting program for each glyph, and that's that.
There is clearly a lot of work in the software arena that could be done to aid typeface creation but I don't think there is much money in doing so.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
America invented the internet. No, not Al Gore, but Tim Bernstein-Lee and Mark Andreeson created the World Wide Web ...
Erm, Tim Berners-Lee is not an American.
And Marc Andreessen created MOSAIC, the first graphical browser, but did not create the WWW itself.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
> The USA won WWII
Err, no. The adoption of English as the foremost language of
international trade was pretty much a done deal by 1900. Of course,
this has changed before, and may change again, but the wars in the
twentieth century have pretty much nothing to do with it.
Anyway, I don't think it matters what _languages_ these fonts do
or don't support, as long as they have all the needed symbols to
support MathML. That means Latin and Greek alphabets at minimum,
plus aleph (from Hebrew), and of course all the various non-letter
symbols.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I think you could reasonably argue that both LaTeX 2e and, probably, the AMS stuff for (La)TeX are standard among the community.
The TeX community is surely one of the first and best examples of collaborative development. It's free, multi-platform and there's a package available to do almost anything. Sadly, it's also an example of the single biggest drawback: sometimes (the LaTeX 3 project), it just stops when no-one has the time available any more, and everyone using it and waiting for their pet peeves to be fixed is stuffed.
And by the way, since when was putting Computer Modern and Times near each other even remotely sane? That's why you get alternative math fonts for LaTeX if you're going to be writing in Times! :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.