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!"

Comments

Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, we can't even get a stand for HTML, and now we're going to try to get fancy fonts a standard?

Font specifications

[PhysicsGenius]

The entire web was founded on the concept that content was king and now it seems all we can talk about it format. I bet Tim Bernard Lee would be spinning in his grave if he knew Slashdot was running articles on how sites should be choosing fonts.

Re:Font specifications

[Pfhreakaz0id]

this works until your corporate officers are visiting someone at another company and says "well, just pull up our website. It's on there" and sees that (god forbid) it looks DIFFERENT (because he has raised his font size, has a different resolution) and comes screams at the IT department that the web site isn't following corporate look and feel standards.

That's why, in many large companies, the web site is COMPLETELY under the domain of the marketing department. IT/MIS has absolutely nothing to say about it.

This is a fact of business life.

Re:Font specifications

[Disoculated]

Could you be more obscure? I mean, if you look up Tim Bernard Lee in Google, you don't get anything meaningful. You DO get a nice picture of a couple with their brand new baby, but I don't think that's relevant.

And if anyone is spinning in their grave about Slashdot running articles on fonts, then dear god, how do they react to the stories about Doom being ported to the Nokia phone?

Isn't the technology all about how the content is presented? Shouldn't that be what geeks care about?

Re:Font specifications

[marhar]

entire web was founded on the concept that content was king and now it seems all we can talk about it format

Note that their goal it to create "comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats."

Having a consistent method of displaying/formatting formulae and other complex content is a very valuable thing.

D. Knuth, please call your office!

Re:Font specifications

[WatertonMan]

The problem is that the separation between form and content isn't as clear as many pretend. Take the obvious example, albeit one not that common any more. Back in the day when there were many different used word processing formats things came up differently. Perhaps the words (the content) were more or less the same. However if tables and so forth came out differently then the content really wasn't the same because of the problem of getting the original content into a form you could read.

Put in more simple terms - content is only content when it can be discerned as such. Perhaps someone speaking Russian to you is saying something useful. But if you don't speak Russian, it does you know good.

The big problem from day one with the world wide web was assuming that a very simple display engine was sufficient. This was naive and in part led to all that fracturing of the market that enabled Microsoft to take it over. Yes CSS helps a bit (although it came rather late). However the problem of fonts is still a big one that has not, in my opinion, been adequately solved.

Admittedly it is one that is more of a problem for people in academics. (i.e. physics and mathematics) And for web display most of these people simply convert their equations to GIFs or (more commonly now) simply keep everything in PDF. While Adobe tried to leverage their Acrobat product as an alternative to many web standards, the fact is that PDFs have many limits.

And of course there is still that problem of generating PDFs. This being Slashdot and all, I'm sure that all the TeX fans will come out of the woodwork. However for regular users it is often less than helpful. Even the equation editor in Word, while helpful, isn't the ideal solution in my opinion.

Unfortunately, given that the number of people who write equations is such a small niche, I don't think we'll see this solved in a nice fashion. And, to be fair, things today are VASTLY superior to how things were back in the days of typewriters.

Math fonts.

[DarkHelmet]

You had to use math fonts as an example of why this is necessary...

What about wingdings, you elitist pig?

</humor>

The least of our worries

[ekrout]

There are many things that I worry regarding the Web, but support for CmdrTacoScribble02.ttf is the least of our worries.

With large corporations comes a lot of money, which we all know can influence nearly anyone to change their views. Microsoft has near dominance with their Windows + x86 platform and has been trying to change the Web from an open standards-based database of all the information in the World into yet-another-slice-of-the-computing-pie, right next their gigantic slices of Windows and Office.

So I humbly ask that designers and advocates of the my-font-anywhere revolution talked about in this article don't forget about keeping standards open for all of the Web. This includes not only fonts, but more important subsects such as Web servers, scripting languages, databases, XML, etc.

Re:It's time to adapt to a new reality

[FrostedWheat]

Why should the West be forced to subsidize cultures and nations that produce no tangible benefits to humanity?

Do us all a favour, keep going west. You'll eventually find an ocean. Just keep going...

but, the article is about...

[simpl3x]

...math and science fonts! these are designed to go along with the various versions of times. reading is hard work!

Re:You can Make Websites Any Font You want..

[RAMMS EIN]

``There are several implementations in HTML that allow you to upload any font to a clients browser''
Right. ``several implementations''. And there's a standard, too (CSS). I'm just afraid that this isn't very well supported (it wouldn't surprise me at all if M$IE didn't grok it, after all, it's a standard. :-/

The other problem with this is that most fonts either suck, or can't be distributed with websites in this way due to patent || license || copyright issues. Making _your_ fonts available with the website is the last step in the process of fully being able what it looks like - in compliant browsers...

Yep those are great

[Anonymous Coward]

Those fonts are free in perpetuity. MS cannot revoke them ever, even though they pulled them off their site, it was too late. :-)

If you don't believe me feel free to read the license that accompanied them. All you have to do is distribute them in non modified form and MS cannot ever revoke that license. They are free to use and free to distribute!

Again I just want to say thanks to MS who by using such a liberal license actually ended up screwing themselves for once instead of the rest of us. Thanks MS, I'm enjoying your fonts on several linux computers right now and there is not a dam thing you can do about it.

Re:Pah, forget these ''math'' fonts...

[panaceaa]

Your fonts are nice. Do you ever consider making more corporate or professional looking fonts? I find that there are lots of people like you creating off-the-wall goofy fonts, which is great (it's art!), but not very usable. Would it be too boring to make more traditional fonts? You can add lots of attitude and feel to your fonts and still have them be usable in papers and in more conservative outlets.

Re:Unknown languages that no one speaks.

[mark-t]

Actually, no.

The fact that most of the civilized world speaks English today (although not necessarily as a primary language) has nothing to do with WWII, it has everything to do with the industrial and technological revolutions that have shaped what we call civilization today.

As it happens, English is very adapted to describing very technical ideas, much more suited than any other currently existing language. Latin accomplished this reasonably well also, but failed to remain established as a living language for other reasons. Although many other languages have Latin roots, Anglo Saxon, which ultimately evolved into English, happened to speak "science" best. As technology became more and more prevalent in our society, the need for terminology to describe those ideas became more significant. This led to English becoming increasingly popular in countries where these technologies were being used or experimented with. What accellerated this even further was the fact that many of these technologies made it viable to communicate across vast distances in much shorter periods of time than was ever possible before. Such technologies included the transportation industry, which can allow a person to travel hundreds, or even thousands of miles in a single day. The global community that was created by the invention of such technologies strengthened the world's need for a common mode of communication. English was available, so it was used.

So no... the fact that we speak English today has nothing to do with the USA or WWII. Necessity has always been the mother of invention, and English is as prevalent as it is because the world "needed" it.

Of course, one can always make a (not too unreasonable) argument that technologies were thrust forward more quickly than they might have been _because_ of the wars in the early half of the 20th century... but that's another issue altogether.

(I humbly apologize for this massively offtopic post -- replies via email please)

Re:The 5 Linux fonts

[Trepidity]

I don't think it's actually possible to learn how to configure X properly. There's about 5 different "standard" ways of setting up fonts in X, and the details change with every revision. To make matters worse, many of the important ones (like Xft) are poorly documented.

CM fonts are limited, and ugly

[apsmith]

at least when used together with Times-Roman text, which is the standard for most major publishers. Almost nothing besides TeX actually uses CM fonts for anything, and the goal here is to have fonts that are very widely usable. Since I'm working on the project I know a little about what we're trying to do... :-)

The major thing here first is that we've tried to collect all the symbol glyphs used at least occasionally, including alphabetic symbols (script, fraktur, openface, etc.). Not just arrows, or what's in cmex, or the ams groups - but everything we could get our hands on. After collecting the glyphs and associated characters and their meanings in use, we managed to run it through Unicode so the new Unicode 3.2 has standardized positions and descriptions for the majority of the thousands of characters we're working on. The current phase is actual font creation - creating a single set of consistent-looking fonts, with an overall goal of being "Times compatible", in weight, x-height, general style, etc. The final phase will be packaging and distribution; we need to get these in a form that they're usable by both TeX (Type-1's) and general applications on the widest range of OS's (probably OpenType based on the Type-1's).

Unfortunately, while the hyperref package works fine for TeX (I actually wrote the original HyperTeX standard used to make that happen) I'm not aware of any other publishing platforms that do automatic linking in PDF's - it's pretty rare to see it, anyway. And the end-point of the link may bring up a browser or another acrobat file, depending on where it goes, which makes the whole thing less than seamless... How many times have you actually followed a PDF link? You can always add them manually, but that definitely qualifies as "difficult". In any case, PDF files are a fixed page layout, and tend to be larger than HTML/XML, so they have a number of disadvantages besides linking.