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?
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.
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
Read More about how fonts/typefaces can/can't be trademarked, patented, copyrighted, etc.
I also doubt that Tim Berners-Lee would like being called Tim Bernard Lee .
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>
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...
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.
If you want your mathematical publications to look really good, just use my fonts.
http://fonts.tom7.com/
Trust me. Instant PhD.