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!"
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
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.
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
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.
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...
...math and science fonts! these are designed to go along with the various versions of times. reading is hard work!
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
First ASCII, now this...
:) so if you want to eat rice, you have to do it chopsticks!
America invented the internet.
>>>>>>>>>
China invented fireworks. No fireworks for you! Bye bye fourth of July. Phoenicians invented the "English" alphabet, so you best stop writing! Arabs invented Algebra and the "English" system of numerals is Indian in origin. There goes math! In fact, 0 is a concept that originated in India, so you'll have to find another value to denote your IQ.
America uses the internet the most. During the late 90s, Internet traffic in North America more than doubled every six months.
>>>>
Europeans use cell phones the most, so I guess we should all adopt GSM. The Chinese eat rice the most (I'm from India, another rice-eating nation, so this isn't a racist comment
Don't even get me started on the last one. World history is my little hobby, I'd have to intellectually beat the crap out of you...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
That's it. That's the only reason. Otherwise, we might all be speaking German. Or, if the USA's War of the Rebellion had ended differently, perhaps Spanish. Or, if the USSR had won the cold war, Russian.
If things continue at their current rate, we may all be speaking Chinese in 100 years.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
China invented fireworks. No fireworks for you! Bye bye fourth of July. Phoenicians invented the "English" alphabet, so you best stop writing! Arabs invented Algebra and the "English" system of numerals is Indian in origin. There goes math! In fact, 0 is a concept that originated in India, so you'll have to find another value to denote your IQ.
Duh! All that stuff happened before America was around! Those countries had no choice but to invent their own stuff. And look! It took them four thousand years to do it! America went from oxen and ploughs to 747s, space lasers, pr0n, individually packaged pre-moistened towelettes, microwave burritos, electricity, HDTV, indoor plumbing, hydroponics, the Internet, and the god-damned atom bomb in a little over two hundred years! What has the rest of the world done in that time? Nothin'! Bunch of lazy, good-for-nothing lazy people...
(Yes, I'm kidding. If you're not laughing, it just means my sense of humor is better than yours.)
I write in my journal
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
And the Americans were the only ones to occupy Japan.
The post-war economy was driven by the USA, Germany, and Japan. In the USA they spoke English; in Germany and Japan, their second language was English. In most of South America the second language is English (due to the dominance of the USA in the hemisphere). It was the USA that drove this trend, not England. Post-war England was economically almost as ruined as post-war mainland Europe, with rationing long after it was lifted in the USA. The war effort drove technological advances that the USA, with it's intact manufacturing base, was able to exploit to dominate the world economy. If you wanted to due business with the Americans (and who didn't?), you learned English. Period. WWII was the piviotal change that made the 20th Century the "American Century." And that drove English world-wide.
And yes, it's massivly off-topic.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Offtopic, but... It had nothing to do with a few hundred years of British Imperialism making English the standard language of intercountry trade? England was a (the?) big trading fish long before the United States was ever able to do anything of importance.
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
Yeah, if this is the only reason they're creating STIX, they're sorely mistaken. While the 'auto' PDF generation tools out there may not all make it easy to get links into your PDFs (I'm thinking the "print as PDF" type tools) - Adobe Acrobat does just fine. Shell out some dough for Acrobat and you can pretty much make PDFs dance. Embed things like SVG and such, even, if I'm not mistaken.
In any case - hyperlinks would be a piece of cake.
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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
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)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
...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.
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.
(pours a shot)
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
Dude, why can't people spend 2 seconds in Google before being stupid. The lineage of the alphabet traces directly from Phoenician, Latin was only one of the languages in that line. The numerals are Indian, they're just called Arabic numerals because the west was introduced to it through Arab traders who had travelled from India.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
No, the US _loaned_ the UK the weapons and food. I think we're still paying today.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.