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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!"
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
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
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.