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!"
Sorry Folks. Hadda. Never got it before. *shrugs*
I am teh clevor
It seems like for the last 3 days or so, the NYTimes site has been phenomenally slow (all the time, not just when being /.'d). I can't count how many timeouts I've suffered when trying to access them.
I've been using the freefont fontset, and find them pretty nice.
http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
Damn, we can't even get a stand for HTML, and now we're going to try to get fancy fonts a standard?
You know the interesting thing about fonts is that they can't be copyrighted, only trademarked under US law. It seems a bit weird, until you realize the implications... font owners would be able to have some control over any documented printed with their fonts.
On the other hand, font making people have tried to claim that their fonts are 'software' and thus copyrightable. But if you made a duplicate font 'by hand' it would be legal... but you would have to call it something else, as 'times new roman' and 'verdana' are trademarks of various font providers.
Another ramification of this is that you can get really cheap fonts for your computer that look exactly the same as some of the most expensive ones.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
What about wingdings, you elitist pig?
</humor>
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
How about open anuses on the web? I think I left my anus open.
Wir mussen wissen. Wir warden wissen. I am a wuss
corefonts.sourceforge.net
Yes, I know they're MS fonts
has always been a problem. When I used to work in academia supporting professors and graduate students who were trying to write papers with inordinately complex mathematical models you begin to understand why it is a problem.
Really, the methodology for creating the paper depended sharply on the ultimate destination (or publication). Every publisher has their own requirements for typeset, etc. Really you need to convince publishers to agree to accept the font package before it will win broad acceptance.
There are several implementations in HTML that allow you to upload any font to a clients browser, so that you can display the page, as you intended it, instead of having the client browser pick a font at random for them. It's easy enough to do, just requires one line of code, and the font uploaded to the server.
I can see, the draw for open source fonts, however. I think the reasoning behind this is that it will allow people to create works, using whatever open source font they want, and not have to worry about paying someone for it. just my Humble opinion... I could be wrong...
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
As a web developer this sounds great in concept, the ability to use any fontset that will work with any browser sounds great. I'm fearful that this will mean yet ANOTHER plug-in required to view a page. Flash, java, quicktime, real, etc, etc.
Arial
Helvecta
Times New Roman
Courier New
Terminal
Linux has only has those 5 fonts, nothing else!
Seriously, though, proper presentation of content ensures that the content is being accurately conveyed and is comprehensible.
Garbled content is the Man in the Iron Mask, rightfully king but hidden away.
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.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
The civilized world has standardized on English for good reason: You can't get anything done if people can't understand each other. This is a crucial element of the cause of internationalism.
If we allow a thousand savage little countries to transform written language into a thousand incomprehensible "systems" of squiggles and dots, if we allow the Europeans to run riot adding arbitrary squiggles and dots at random to perfectly good letterforms, chaos will continue to be the order of the day in the world. With millions starving in Africa, is it really wise or even sane to waste effort furthering the atomization and degeneration of written language from a useful tool into a maze of different secret codes, each the sole provice of a self-anointed "elite" in one little country or another, not one of them of any Earthly use in communicating? Is this of benefit to the poor and disenfranchised of the world?
I doubt it.
We discussed the reasons instant messaging software doesn't display non-ISO-8859-1 characters a few weeks ago - where are the smart libraries that can figure out font-groups and tell apps that with the current user preferences, they should display encoding such-and-such using this font, and the other encoding using that one? For that matter the same thing is needed for input (key code * encoding = character) - whose responsibility is that?
I know this is a little bit off topic, but think about all the kids/adults kids in India (or any non-ISO-8859-1 country) being unable to use certain apps or even operating systems because key aspects cannot be localized.
- America invented the internet. No, not Al Gore, but Tim
Bernstein-Lee and Mark Andreeson created the World Wide Web as we know it
today. DARPA created the infrastructure and Berkeley created the
protocols. The Internet is a Western invention and anyone who wants to use
it has no choice but to live with its Western customs.
- America uses the internet the most. During the late 90s,
Internet traffic in North America more than doubled every six months.
Certainly, the same could not be said of any country that writes with worm
trails on paper instead of using the standard A-Z alphabet.
- The West contributes the most to civilization. From
industrialization, to computers, to biotechnology, and beyond, history has
shown that Westerners have done more in 100 years to advance civilization
than the rest of the world has done in two millennia. Why should the West
be forced to subsidize cultures and nations that produce no tangible
benefits to humanity?
Just my 2c.-b.
but, 7000 different hearts and telephones and arrows would be fun too!
...math and science fonts! these are designed to go along with the various versions of times. reading is hard work!
Without them. LFS all the way baby. GTK2, X4.2.1, XFT, all the bonuses.
Go to a major website: /.-google-yahoo-ebay. They don't need any fancy fonts. All that nonsense is like those annoying 'follow-your-cursor' scripts they use at the Angelfire and Geocities sites we all have come to despise. If you really want people to see your CoOl FoNtS, type whatever you want in word, copy it to paint, make the font WHATEVER YOU GOD DAMNED PLEASE, and make it alll a picture file. Or just make people download the font, and if they don't... TIMES ROMAN IS JESUS
The Noah's Ark of the Web, 7,000 Characters at a Time
By JEFFREY SELINGO
IT'S one of the most frustrating problems encountered when passing documents back and forth electronically: the little square boxes that mean a font someone else used to create the file cannot be rendered on your computer. While Portable Document Format, or PDF, files, which essentially are copies of printed pages, have helped mitigate the problem for most computer users, that solution has not satisfied scientists and mathematicians, whose formulas and equations contain many symbols.
Using those symbols on the Web has been particularly inconvenient. Most publishers use the symbol-friendly PDF format, but then researchers cannot easily embed links to other files or background information within those documents as they can with HTML files. But HTML documents have their own drawbacks. For instance, they often display equations as separate graphic images that cannot be resized or searched and greatly increase the size of the file.
Now a new set of fonts being developed by six publishers of scientific, technical and medical journals promises to contain every character - more than 7,000 in all - that might be needed in a technical article published in any scientific discipline. When complete, sometime next fall, the fonts will be shared freely with publishers, software manufacturers and scholars, under the condition that they not be altered.
"This work is a breakthrough for publishers and scientists," said Tim Ingoldsby, director of business development at the American Institute of Physics, one of the publishers working on the project, called the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange, or STIX (www.stixfonts.com). "The display of math symbols in publishing has always been difficult, but those problems have only become worse with the Web."
The set of STIX fonts will work very much like the Symbol or Zapf Dingbats fonts in most applications, where users choose from a grid of dozens of characters. The STIX font will have the appearance of a Times font, but the characters will not look any different if a user switches to a different font, like Courier or Helvetica, Mr. Ingoldsby said. "The symbols will work with pretty much any font," he said.
Mr. Ingoldsby said most scientific characters lack "flavor" - they are quite plain to look at - so adding one of those symbols to a document composed using, for instance, a serif font, which has fine lines projecting from the main strokes of the letter, will not make the scientific character stand out. Designers are also adding the alphabet, numbers and other common characters to the STIX font, so, Mr. Ingoldsby said, there will be no need to switch between fonts.
"This is meant to replace the font which people use today called New Times Roman," he said.
About 200 characters of the STIX fonts are being finished each month, Mr. Ingoldsby said. So far, about half of the 7,000 characters have been completed.
With so many symbols, however, the STIX fonts could be cumbersome to use. The developers are working to come up with a method that will make it relatively easy for users to find the symbols they want. Symbols will probably be organized by type or subject, with the user selecting a category (and possibly a subcategory) from drop-down menus. A grid of symbols in that category will then appear, from which the user can choose the appropriate one.
Creating a new font set is a complicated process. First, developers must correctly copy the shape of each character. Then they must adjust its metrics, or how the character is positioned in the space in which it is supposed to fit. And finally, they must make another set of adjustments to be sure the character looks good on a computer screen.
William H. Mischo, head of the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that the STIX project had the potential to solve a problem that dates back to the 1400's, when Gutenberg first conceived of movable type.
"The two biggest problems since then for properly rendering intellectual works have been tables and mathematics," Mr. Mischo said. "Here we are in the digital age and we're still having these problems."
Because math equations have been included in Web pages mostly as static images, as either a PDF or a graphics file, scholars have not been able to take advantage of many of the Web's distinctive research capabilities, Mr. Mischo said. For example, a mathematician cannot just plug a particular equation into Google and expect to find other scholars working on a similar problem, since the symbols in a graphic will probably not turn up in a search.
"For someone trying to read a scholarly publication, the current way of doing things presents difficulties," Mr. Mischo said. "You can't enlarge, you can't pull it apart and you can't search it."
The lack of a comprehensive font for math symbols presents aesthetic problems as well. The text in math publications is usually unattractive because publishers are often forced to cobble together a variety of fonts to create complex equations.
"Courier may have one set of math characters and Bookman may have another set of characters, but they are not going to look good together," said Paul Topping, president of Design Science, a company in Long Beach, Calif., that makes an equation editor for Microsoft Word. "STIX will be a coordinated set of fonts that are meant to work together."
Of course, new ideas are always being developed in math and science, and some require new symbols. Mr. Ingoldsby, of the American Institute of Physics, said STIX will be updated when new characters are created.
"We're trying harder to work with authors so they come up with something new only when there absolutely has to be something new," he said.
OK. So the previous story included the project name, and this one does not. *sigh*
This is an embarrassment. A disgrace. What do you think Tim Bernard Lee would be saying if he were alive today?
"Help me out of this box, I can't breathe in here! Help, let me out!"
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
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.
The link to why it's necessary doesn't have an explination. All it seems to have is a page of a billion and one math fonts. ..oh wait... nevermind...
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
The STIX fonts look like an interesting idea, but I don't see from the article while they're truly necessary. The Computer Modern fonts used by TeX, the standard for mathematical typesetting, work just fine.
In addition, the article claims incorrectly that PDFs cannot easily include hyperlinks. I believe the authors of the hyperref package would be fascinated to know this their package allows easy embedding of hyperlinks and anchors into PDF files, such that the links work perfectly in Acrobat, xpdf, and other viewers.
-- Brian T. Sniffen
The article is about the difficulty of writing equations and formulas with current fonts. Anyone who has been to college and has seen their math professors' GIFs of important equations can attest to this.
See comment above: Truth be told...
Somebody just tell me where I can find the Zodiac (as in the serial killer from the 70s) font. And no, they're not at Killer Fonts I already looked there...
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
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...
Yes, we definitely need open fonts. I think that closed fonts such as 'O', 'Q', 'D' are bad for the internet. Also partially closed fonts such as 'A', 'P', 'R' and the rest harm the way net works. We should convert all fonts to open ones, 'I', 'L', 'J' etc.
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
If you want your mathematical publications to look really good, just use my fonts.
http://fonts.tom7.com/
Trust me. Instant PhD.
Like the IEEE journal standard? Or the IEEE article standard?
I've got latex2e class files for both of those formats, which includes how the fonts should be layed out, figures, bibliography, page numbers, equations, and pretty much everything else.
I also have one from my University and past university for their thesis formats (at the Undergrad, Grad, and pHD levels for each).
Publishers just need to get everyone to accept metadata for how they want things to look; changing look and feel and fonts should be easy as long as you're using a WYSIWYM package.
I don't even know now what they wanted; all I know is that I had to edit one line to make my paper look the way they wanted it to.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Won't most of these new non-alphanumeric symbols just be ignored by google's search tokenizer anyway?
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Seems like they're only creating times-like fonts, from the FAQ:
6. Will the STIX Fonts have a general appearance that I will recognize?
Yes. The STIX Fonts will be a "Times compatible" font set. They will resemble the basic Windows Times New Roman(TM) or Adobe Times(TM) font appearance. All such font sets are derived from the original Monotype set designed by Victor Lardent under Stanley Morison's direction for the Times of London in 1932.
I personally like Arial best, for most purposes, but this is a good effort anyway; the fonts distributed with most distros suck big time. A good Times font would be a good start.
I only wonder if they will distribute it under a true free license (FSF-free). If they won't, I wonder if Debian will include them in the main distro.
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.
A browser is for displaying information in an efficient way. It is not for page layout. You want a nicely-printed book, paper, etc, use a document processor. You want to look up information or view pr0n easily, use a web browser.
Furthermore, the USA paid for all the weapons the UK and the USSR used and all the food they ate throughout the entire war.
It's true that they helped fight, but we could have beaten Hitler and the Japanese on our own if we really had to. Neither Russia nor the UK could have hoped even to survive that war without our help.
Maybe we should switch to use chinese and get it over with... Who can understand them anyways?
I can see, the draw for open source fonts, however.
Hey! It's William Shatner!
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
I see they are using nonstandard character encodings on their web site. Are they really serious about being cross-platform?
> Won't most of these new non-alphanumeric symbols just be ignored by
...) is the hard part of
> google's search tokenizer anyway?
If so, it would be trivial to design a math-oriented search engine.
Getting everything out there switched over to MathML from the various
horrible hacks (make the whole equation an enormous image, use a
thousand <font> tags and tell the user to either install the sixteen
fonts you found your symbols in or go away, do the entire paper in
Unportable Document Format, make images for each of the various
symbols and use RHNTLFTP (Really Horrific Nested Table Layout From
The Pit), or whatever else you can dream up that somehow gets the
thing to look almost right on the screen
that problem.
Once the documents use clean and consistent markup, searching becomes
somewhat easier.
I still want the ability to link to certain positions in other
peoples' web pages where they didn't think to put a named anchor...
Then again, I want too much. I'm horrible that way. Our library's
catalog automation software vendor asked us at a convention once
what features we'd like to see added, and the first thing that popped
out of my mouth was the ability to search the full text of all the
books in the library. (Thing is, I was serious. I want that feature.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
8. Most fonts today have no more than about 225 glyphs, at most.
While most TrueType (Windows and Macintosh) fonts today have this limit, Type 1 (PostScript) fonts do not, and can be much larger.
-----
That really confused me. While fighting with the dreaded Linux font setup, I cursed and cursed Type 1 fonts because they had a limit of 255 characters. TrueType fonts were better - Tahoma, for example, has well over 500 glyphs, not to mention the 20 MB Unicode font from MS.
Can somebody clarify what is being talked about?
I will probably be shot for praising a MS product, but MS Word used to have an excellent method for entering equations. Then MS came out with equation editor (which sucks) and ditched the good thing they had.
This was way back in MS Word for macintosh circa 1990. IIRC one would type command-\ and it would use an inline encoding to build the equation. So a square root 2 would be typed command-\ r 2 command-\. It produced beautiful results, worked well inline or by itself, was scalable, editable, didn't require one's hands to leave the keyboard, etc.
The only problem is that it required one to RTFM (or at least RTFHelp-Menu) and remember "obscure" character commands like r=root, i=integral, etc.
*sigh*
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
n/t
I wrote a copyrighted book called "The Blank Page" thinking that I could get a cut of every printed page saying that it was derivative of my "The Blank Page". But then I found out that my work was just a translation of an ancient Egyption text called: "The Wall has no Hyrogliphs". And I thought that I had an angle . . .
If we specify the exact font then we don't leave the visually impaired the ability to choose what they would like.
Please mod up parent.
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
I have no idea who Tim Bernard Lee is, and Google wasn't much help.
...to good ol' WordPerfect, eh? For its time, its ability to display equations was miles ahead of any other word processor!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
http://www.w3.org/#technologiesd e.org/
http://www.unico
All the above come together and applied properly goes a long way toward solving the problem.
Granted none of them will teach you russian, but hey...
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.
Your use of a browser may be displaying information in an efficient way. I'll wager that 90+% of people using a browser want a visually interesting experience. The web is no longer the preserve of just the odd academic paper, and there is no reason it shouldn't be presented nicely even if it is. If you want a straightforward, no-frills presentation, that's fine, but don't tell everyone else that they're using the web wrong just because it's not your own way. They'll just ignore you, and rightly so.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The reason you separate content from presentation is precisely so that the latter can be changed independently of the former. By all means don't litter your HTML with font tags, but what's the problem with presenting a nice visual stylesheet with it? Modern CSS can even specify multiple stylesheets for different media, so you can have whizzy visual effects on screen, nicely readable black and white for printing, and potentially audio hints and such for sightless users as well. WTP?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Energy: time to change the picture.
It cares about fonts if the characters you're trying to render don't exist in the font!!!
We're talking about obscure math symbols like the curly harpoon/arrow combinations or fraktur H that really means something distinct from roman H in the context. Almost all of the ones we're working on have unicode numbers assigned - and almost all of them show up in some form in some existing font, but there is no existing single set of fonts that has all these characters in a consistent style.
For the visually impaired, these are perfectly scalable fonts, so there's no problem with magnifying them to 36 point or whatever you want on the screen.
Also, if somebody does come along with another set of fonts with the same set of unicode characters represented, it should be possible (via CSS say) to substitute those other fonts if that's what you want...
Energy: time to change the picture.
Sure, it's http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/dmca.html
Here's my methodology:
What? the hyperlinks? they're image maps, of course!
What? Javascript? Well, I don't use scripting, because the really cross-browser stuff you can hack is really useless stuff anyway.
Good old Boney. Forgot about him. Yeah, Hitler probably would've bogged down too. Could have have held on to what he did grab? I mean, I have no idea. I'm not a military historian, I'm a grammar Nazi. Different skill-set.
But I don't see any way the Soviets could have ended up holding all of Eastern Europe and half of Germany all by themselves. Remember, Hitler wouldn't have been fighting a war on two fronts if we hadn't kept England on life support and then invaded France. The Soviets would not have done so well alone. Instead, they'd have been with some or all of Russia and probably an even bigger pile of dead patriots than they did end up with.
sOops. That wasn't irony, it was alcohol. Closely related, though...
So what? At the time, you couldn't afford to pay cash. As I recall, the terms were pretty reasonable, too, even leaving aside the fact that pretty much any terms are preferable to ignominy and subjugation. I mean, paying off a loan for sixty years beats the hell out of being occupied by Hitler for sixty years, the way I look at it.
It's not so much that it came late as that it was implemented late (and poorly). CSS1 has been a W3C recommendation since ... oh, back in the day (1995?). A Microsoft internal memo that came out during the (first) anti-trust trial revealed a high-level directive to prevent "our pages from looking good in competitors' browsers." Of course, Netscape was far from blameless, as can be attested by anyone who has ever had to wrestle CSS into shape for NS 4.x browsers....
I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Okay, Okay -- I admit it. You didn't change that program that worked
just a little while ago; I inserted some random characters into the
executable. Please forgive me. You can recover the file by typing in
the code over again, since I also removed the source.
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