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.
What about wingdings, you elitist pig?
</humor>
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
He might be spinning in his grave -- if he were dead.
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.
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.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
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!
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
I also doubt that Tim Berners-Lee would like being called Tim Bernard Lee .
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.
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.
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.
I should think TBL would be more concerned about the implication that he is dead.
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
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...
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.
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.
I heard that he already dug out his future grave, and likes sleeping in it every night. Anyone who invents something like the WWW is bound to be weird like that.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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!
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 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
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.
(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.