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Bitstream To Donate 10 Fonts To Free Software World
21mhz writes "Posted on FootNotes: The GNOME Foundation and Bitstream Inc. announce long-term agreement to bring high quality fonts to Free Software. Ten fonts will be released for use under a special open license agreement, giving advanced font capabilities to all free and open source software developers and users. Read the full press release for more details." Modification and re-release (under a different name) is explicitly allowed, too.
For publicity or for common good?
i very much would like to use a linux distro full time, but i just can't stand the state of linux fonts right now. redhat 8.0 does have some nice fonts but generally the fonts used in the mozilla browsing experience just suck! i hear you can get fully anti-aliased fonts working on linux but it seems to be a bit of a chore....
smd4985
"These fonts will be available to all developers and users, giving GNOME and other open source programs a great look right out of the box that has been lacking until now."
:-)
They obviously haven't tried RH8.0
Not that I'm complaining... the more fonts the better!!!
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Also, if it's open source, why it is "long term"? They said "special license" but they didn't post the license itself.
... for us design geeks who like to design on the linux platform... now if The Powers That Be would just develop something like Quark.... but I digress.
:)
Graphic design, its not just for the Mac any more
sad robot making broken music
get free fonts at free fonts.com
These 10 fonts shall increase my usability experience, allowing me to show them off to all!
It's always good to hear news like this.. companies don't need to open source everything.. just donate a little to the community and it'll fill our hearts with warm feelings.
--------
Free your mind.
will give full functionality to projects like Freetype, XFT2 and X Render extensions of the XFree86 project, Pango, KDE and Trolltechs QT, among many others...
that is certainly good news. a few of those (pango, and freetype specifically) have given me hell in the past. hopefully those days are gone....
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
I've got lots of fonts already; I've got Adobe fonts, Bitstream fonts, Microsoft fonts, etc.. I just wish that the default configuration on my Red Hate 8 box didn't make them all look like crap.
Honestly, I'm glad that Bitstream is a good enough community player to donate these. Only problem is our community is served a whole lot more by quality than it is by quantity.
You know you're a geek when you get excited about the release of new fonts.
Which ones?
So where and when are these fonts going to be availible?
There are already lots of free fonts available. The only problem is that they all look like shit!
Well wasn't that sweet of them. Glad to see SOMEONE concerned about the font situation in *nix. RedHat made a leap forward by allowing TrueType fonts to be used in KDE/Gnome natively just by dropping them in ~/.fonts. But with this release, and hopefully more to come, we won't need to be bound by TrueType much longer. Yay!
> Modification and re-release (under s different
> name) is explicitly allowed, too
Like changing my browser's font so that an "a" looks like an "s"?
Shouldn't it be a rule that the editors have to use the Preview button? I like Slashdot, but sometimes it should be called Slapdash.
Don't confuse font type with the way the font is displayed. Linus is not very good at displaying the fonts, unfortunately. Anti-aliasing is far off the Windows standard. However, even the best font would be affected that way. So, getting professional help with designing new fonts for Linux is great news. Just read this story and attached comments again, in case you do not agree at once.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Please save the "ohh but its only 10 fonts" comments.
The microsoft world does very well with ARIAL, COURIER, and TIMES NEW ROMAN.
(Actually, most of the personal computing world does fairly well with these fonts)
I used CHICAGO, TIMES and BOOKMAN exclusively for years on a Mac LCII.
The crux of the issue is that these should be high quality fonts. THAT is a big deal. Kerning is a huge pain.
"ae" vs "lk" vs "ld" vs "dl" vs "kl" -- spacing changes more than you think. Amen, hallelujah...now lets just see how they look.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
I guess I just don't understand the big deal here. You can get free fonts from multiple places - why is this nothing more than a bit of free publicity for the company? And since the article didn't state which fonts - how would one know that its going to be useful? They put out this article - get the publicity - and all they have to do is give away really arcane or unused fonts. Am I missing the point?
Now I don't have to blatantly disregard Microsoft's EULA by copying True Type fonts over to Linux anymore. Finally distros will be crisp and clear on first install!
How nice of them to toss us poor peasants a bone.
Sets of fonts that are the exact same size as the
standard Microsoft fonts (e.g. Arial). This is
one of the key problems when trying to export
files from Open Office to an MS Word user - the
fonts end up not matching correctly and things
look funny.
My $.02.
I can imagine Microsoft doing something like this.. a totally out of the blue, unexpected gesture, getting everyone really excited.
:)
Then they release ten variations of webdings.. the press release says "Try rendering your pages using THOSE on Mozilla!"
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
"The donation of these fonts to the free software community is the final piece that will give full functionality to projects like Freetype, XFT2 and X Render extensions of the XFree86 project, Pango, KDE and Trolltechs QT, among many others." said Jim Gettys of HP and GNOME Foundation board member.
CAPS LOCK IS LIKE CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
If these fonts were bundled with Mozilla and similar browsers, we could have more variety in our web pages (i.e. not just Arial, Courier, and Times Roman) without font-embedding (which never worked very well anyway).
Now if only we could see these fonts... There's no match for Vera on the Bitstream font search.
Kaching! Finally something decent looking for PocketPC users who're sick of the joke that's portable IE!
are the fonts with common TrueType fonts such as Times New Roman, Ariel, and Courier? It would still be annoying if one does not have good substitutes for these common fonts in the free software world.
1. Helvetica WayTooNarrow
2. Jesse Ventura Bold
3. Another Godamnned Star Trek Font
4. Cthulhu HyperItalic
5. Penis Extra Small
6. Fertilizus Dungbats
7. Douche Medium
8. Bush Wacky Wingdings
9. MS AntiTrust
10. End Times Extra Dark
--- Ban humanity.
hehehe UHF... Great movie.
10 fonts? WOO! Let's all celebrate.
Seriously, what is the big deal with this? That's like MS saying "Here. Have 47 lines of source code from Windows."
When this story becomes a repost in about 8 hours?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
According to the press release, the fonts to be released are from the Bitstream Vera family. A quick google didn't show anything though. Perhaps someone with more time on their hands can dig a bit deeper?
Read the announcement, it's all in there.
From the press release (that you didn't read):
"The donation of these fonts to the free software community is the final piece that will give full functionality to projects like Freetype, XFT2 and X Render extensions of the XFree86 project, Pango, KDE and Trolltechs QT, among many others." said Jim Gettys of HP and GNOME Foundation board member. "These fonts will be available to all developers and users, giving GNOME and other open source programs a great look right out of the box that has been lacking until now."
http://tieguy.org/fonts.png
Pretty decent stuff, in my opinion.
Babar
and
Or do you imply that this should be licensed for the use in KDE only?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Why don't you wait until someone actually makes a comment about 10 fonts not being enough before you get upset and cry about it? I realize that it might look like an easy way to gain some karma but come on, you can't possibly need karma this badly, can you? Basically here's what you said: 10 Fonts is a big deal. The fonts released SHOULD be high quality ones. So, how do you know 10 fonts are a big deal son? I mean, let's suppose the second conditional is not satisfied. Then is it still a big deal? Let's suppose these 10 fonts aren't high quality. Big deal? No big deal? Which is it? Please, I'm curious.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
The press release did not say that ONLY Gnome could use this, it just said that Gnome _would_ use it. And that other open source projects could use these fonts. The Gnome foundation, however, probably won't do the development for KDE.
Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
You know you're a geek when you get excited about the release of new fonts.
No kidding.
Of course, if I were posting this from a Linux machine, I wouldn't be excited, because I wouldn't be able to fucking read the story.
I didn't know that the free software community had such a high number of baptisms? Are you guys super fertile or what? I mean, if these Bit Stream people are even teaming up with gnomes to donate fonts to baptise in, they must be trying to give you a hint! Perhaps they are tired of all those people flocking to their stream to be baptised. I mean, even if there is some saint performing them, you have to respect that these people are trying to live their lives in peace. I mean, come on!
Perhaps Bit Stream can get rich exporting holy water to use in these fonts?
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
8. West Wingdings
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
First the Free T-Shirts, Now free fonts! I hope to see more companies get our interest by doing something good for the community than evil --**cough**Microsoft**cough**!
| - | - |
No its more like here, your fonts suck my nuts, these should help. There you go, now you don't need special glasses just to read what you type.
You're nothing; like me.
Dosen't bother me. I make my own with Font Creator Program. Of course, I'm not on linux.
While the main story here is Bitstream's magnanmous gesture to the open source community, I could not help but notice Jim Gettys comments that showed how he viewed the action as important, too, to KDE, despite being on the GNOME board.
I like to see the 2 desktop projects recognize their mutual needs and their mutual strengths.And I'm hoping that someday there will be a bridge between Bonobo and KParts, too.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
They still used the old standard courier font for the press release.
That line originally started in The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
It has since been featured in numerous films, including UHF, Three Amigos!, and Blazing Saddles.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
KDE is a much better and more advanced window manager, so it should have these nice fonts, too.
Actually, anything that runs on top of XFree86 sucks. Besides, Ximian GNOME is much better than all the other sorry excuses for window managers... but it still sucks. Just use Windows for your desktop and use Linux for your server... you'll be much better off.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Arial, courier and times are font families. So Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic are 3 different fonts. If they go by the strict definition of fonts, it's not a big deal.
Also, it might be 10 versions of Symbol...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Hello,
I have released a set of fonts under the GPL (10 or so) my latest "Dustismo" is a good all purpose sans serif, with more then 350 glyphs. get them all at http://www.cheapskatefonts.com/
Thanks,
Dustin
I didnt see the fonts listed. Does the fonts released include "zapfdingbats" and "lucida sans"? I can add lucida via MS fonts, but zapfdingbats is copyrighted, and not avail for download. (Except for Adobe Typeset on windows.)
n tspecific]
Many production X Window software seem to use these 2 fonts, and xfree doesnt include them. No loss, but I see the error all the time, on many applications. (Do a google search, it is a common problem)
aka..
Font specified in font.properties not found [-b&h-lucida sans-medium-r-normal-sans-*-%d-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1]
Font specified in font.properties not found [-urw-itc zapfdingbats-medium-r-normal--*-%d-*-*-p-*-sun-fo
The press release says the Vera font. What I really want is a well populated decent looking scalable unicode font. Will this be just iso-1? or well populated across all of unicode?
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Initially thought this was a troll, but I guess I am just old. On the bright side, maybe these new fonts will be easier on my eyes.
-bp
I don't know the exact history of TTF's, but didn't Apple develop them?
Apple seems to have benefitted from the free software community by utilizing KHTML for it's new browser. Could it return the favor by donating some of it's TTF's for use in Linux/Xfree?
Have you heard about STIX?
The STIX fonts are going to cover all of Unicode.
Maybe I'll never again see "?" for every non-ASCII character. Now, *that* will be useful.
From their site:
The STIX mission will be fully realized when:
* Fully hinted PostScript Type 1 and OpenType font sets have been created.
* All characters/glyphs have been incorporated into Unicode representation or comparable representation and browsers include program logic to fully utilize the STIX font set in the electronic representation of scholarly scientific documents.
Let one of the fonts be WingDings!
we had some good full-fontal images on our screens!
The 10 fonts are all from the same family "Vera". Hopefully they look good enough on the screen and on paper that people won't mind using them.
There are at three major styles "Serif", "Sans" and "Mono", with three minor styles "regular", "italic" and "bold". Thats 9 fonts. I would guess the 10th is a set of symbols.
I haven't been able to find samples of the family on either bitstreams site or myFonts.com so I would also guess that the font is renamed for copyright purposes from something else.
- AndrewN
There is a movement underfoot called TypeRight advocating copyright protection for fonts. The site also explains some of the copyright issues.
It interesting that the lack of copyright protection has apparently not hindered the creation of a wide variety of fonts.
Applying antialiasing to screen fonts makes them harder to read. Seei cles/fog0000000041.html
Joel on Software for the complete argument: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/art
T h 3 Qu 1ck Br0 wn F0x Ju m ps 0v 3r T h 3 L4zy Do9!
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Well the typography geek in me is a little concerned. Bitstream isn't really regarded as a high standard font foundry. Has anyone found a list of exactly which fonts they're giving us? Sure beggers can't be choosers, but a bunch of useless fonts are not going to advance the OS interfaces of KDE and Gnome anymore than the open-source fonts currently available. Additionally, "Modification and re-release (under a different name) is explicitly allowed, too." is not a Good Thing (TM) either.
This is excellent news, indeed.
Good fonts are (a) very hard to design,
(b) rare, (c) expensive and (d) tremendously
important for the feeling of your desktop.
No matter what you say, it takes a special
kind of artistic ability to make good fonts.
This news is much more important than a 10%
speedup or a "new gadget" type of feature.
P.
P.S. Also note, that a "full" font includes
italics, bold, small capitals and quite a few
symbols. Many free fonts are incomplete in
that respect.
He made a mistake, and corrected it. The correction should at least have the same moderation level as the original post
Seriously, I'm perplexed. I understand that making a really nice, readable font is a lot of work -- I've even played around with Fontographer. Getting the kerning and hinting and everything right is both tedious and difficult. But is it actually next to impossible? Is it harder than making a whole Unix-like kernel from scratch? Or the whole rest of a Unix-like OS?
At the very least, why doesn't someone like Red Hat or even IBM hire a top-notch font designer and have him/her just make a few? How long does it take someone with good skills to make a good, basic font? A year? Six months? Two years?
This is a very nice gesture by Bitstream. The one thing I don't like is the constant harping in the press release that this will finally make Linux look good.
Of course, the Gnome Foundation can hardly say anything else, as they would otherwise ruin the good PR for Bitstream, but frankly, I don't think anything is wrong with the fonts right now, with the exception of distros picking dumb defaults, and idiots with a two-day course in using Frontpage building websites. Try surfing the web with 'Use own fonts' on in Galeon, and then viewing the same pages with the specified fonts. If you want a headache, that'll give it to you (sadly, Open Source oriented sites are not free of this evil neither. On default settings NewsForge is unreadable because it picks a sans-serif font in small type, a typographical no-no if there ever was one for a site where the information is supposed to be primarily textual).
After picking the right fonts, I have never felt the need for anti-aliased fonts on my desktop. My text is clear and sharp at 1280x1024, and even my laptop at 1024x768 on 14.4inch screen looks fairly good. Certainly nothing like the headache-inducing nightmare some of the people on this thread want us to believe.
Of course, that I get a nice desktop look with using Adobe fonts for all my settings just proves the point I made in the second paragraph. And the fact that these fonts come standard with X reinforces it.
Still, a big thank you to Bitstream is in order. Whatever the motives, this was a good thing.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Bitstream donated a full set of Speedo fonts
that have been included with X11 since X11R5.
IBM donated the IBM Courier font, included
with X11 since X11R5.
URW++ donated a full set of Base-13 lookalikes
to Ghostscript. They are distributed together
with Ghostscript under the GPL.
Bigelow&Holmes donated the Luxi set of
fonts to be distributed with XFree86. The are
distributed under a ``look but don't touch''
together with XFree86.
There are also Adobe Utopia, Monotype Perpetua
and some Garamond versions that are Free, although
I don't recall the exact terms.
Interesting read, but it's hardly a "complete argument" -- he just says they look "bad" and "blurry", which is opinion more than anything.
For publicity or for common good?
:-)
I doubt it's because of similar ideology.
"Setting the standard for excellence in font technology, Bitstream
holds numerous key patents in the U.S. that cover the
creation of portable fonts for the Internet. Building
on this experience, Bitstream has released
ThunderHawk, a breakthrough technology for the
wireless Web."
Not a big deal right now, but I see friction in the upcoming years as more people come in contact with the Open Source world and cultures clash -- the current corporate view of intellectual property and legal systems for supporting it in the United States don't fit very well with it...
Ah, well. I shouldn't be such a downer right after such a good event. Thank you, Bitstream!
May we never see th
I like to look at it as it is their contribution to *nix. What is your contribution, if you don't mind my asking?
Break the law. Breaking the law.
Some heads are gonna roll.
Just like the Burrito Brothers did for the Great Divide between Rock and Country all those years ago ....
*sniff* It kinda brings a tear to one's eye, no?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Not that I'm complaining... the more fonts the better!!!
I have to say that what Linux really needs is a free top-notch vector font editor, something along the lines of Fontographer. Look at what happened to graphics and icons in interfaces after the GIMP stablized -- they vastly improved. There are a lot of people who'd be willing to "debug" odd spacing in fonts or make fonts *if* they had good tools to do it.
The problem is that this is a pretty non-trivial problem (hell, there isn't even a comprehensive general vector graphics program yet, much less a specialized one).
Something that can let people hand-hint fonts comes out...and instead of recieving a single fish, we can catch our own.
May we never see th
I'll give a good guess that (assuming these are TrueType) that the guy is using a stock binary release of FreeType, which has part of the hinting system disabled to avoid patent issues.
I'd like to see a screenshot from someone who's flipped it on.
May we never see th
Is there an opensource font editing software package. I'm sure there must be one out there, but I've not been able to find it. It would be nice to contribute something to the cause.
This is a VERY welcome bit of goodwill by Bitstream, especially considering how IP paranoid most font foundaries usually are. I do hope that they encode the fonts to allow embedding and subsetting (as many "free" fonts in the past have inadvertantly dissallowed that). Also I hope these fonts contain the full Unicode repertoire (as much as makes sense), and not just the Latin-1 subset.
But I am still anxiously awaiting Adobe to release free versions of their Base PDF fonts. Adobe always makes a big deal about the PDF format being "open" (albeit completely controlled by them). But the one MAJOR non-open component of PDF are the non-open base fonts! Sure the font metrics, aka AFM files, are free (but they hide them very well in the bowels of their ftp site), but not the font outlines.
Come on Adobe, please follow Bitstream's lead and release your base PDF fonts! You can't claim PDF is open until you release the fonts. (Perhaps the same goes for Postscript which has a larger set of Base/Mandatory fonts?)
1) We hope a preliminary version of the fonts will be available next week for download, but no redistribution. They still need some work; consider this a beta test.
2) We hope finished fonts will be available in a month or so, after Jim Lyles (the font designer) has finished them up. We need a few changes: the font family Vera is derived from (Prima) has "0" and "O" too hard to distinguish, and similarly for "1" and "l", given our often technical audience.
There is also some work on hinting, etc, to finish up.
When finished, they will go under a copyright which allows you (roughly) to fold, spindle, and mutilate the fonts, so long as you change the name to something else, and you can sell them so long as you don't sell them by themselves. You can sell them with any software whatsoever. You can freely redistribute the fonts anywhere, anytime, unmodified under that name.
The sale provision is that Bitstream does not want other font vendors to just drop the fonts into their font sale mechanisms and sell them, something they are giving away.
I can't say I blame them.
3) the coverage of these fonts is roughly western european; there is the possibility of some fonts in the future with wider coverage, but as that those fonts are not yet complete, I don't want to say much more, as their availability is much less certain.
4) You can get a good idea of what the fonts look like and what the coverage is by the following URL (once the slashdot effect allows Bitstream to recover).
http://store.bitstream.com/searchresults.asp?se
Now you know where the name Vera comes from
5) the agreement also covers potentially adding characters to the family under the Bitstream Vera name, but Bitstream (and Gnome) reserve the right to approve the additions: we want to *know* when we open fonts of these names that we have what we expect. Feel free to hack to your hearts content under other names, however.
The press release uses the <PRE> element for rendering preformatted text.
This is just to tell the browser that it may render the text with a fixed-width font and leave the white spaces intact. In this case your browser utilizes the Courier font which is one of many fixed-width fonts.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
I know this is offtopic, but its the fastest way I can think of. Will everyone be so kind as to beat the hell out of my server: http://www.pyroxpro.com/ [pyroxpro.com] so I can get a quick stress test? I have no paid ads, or popups, or crap like that, just want slashdot effect stress tested. *PLEASE*
Other than the fact that Apple have released very little stuff they developed themselves, they'd have been better off giving FreeType an unlimited license to TrueType hinting, instead of forcing them to develop an auto-hinter. It wouldn't have even cost anything, I don't know how much they make out of these royalties but I doubt it's much. Yet they do not.
Almost certainly little or nothing. MS already has an unlimited license. However, it has a good deal of worth to Apple in that it adds value to their system in the publishing field -- higher quality font rendering. It's a lovely barrier to entry, and gives Apple an excellent leg up over its competitors (BSD, Linux, etc). I doubt Apple will be giving out licenses any time soon.
May we never see th
yeah, I said it. flame away.
Apple is a microsoft for teachers. that's all.
Why hasn't someone done this sooner. There are Zillions of font packs for windows. Why hasn't anyone packaged them for Linux? This would be "cheap-box" Penguin software on the shelves with minimal extra developer work!
I have been releasing GPL fonts for the past year. My latest one looks very nice and contains 350 + glyphs (including accented characters). It is hard to get the word out though, find them at: cheapskatefonts.com
"not optimized for actual ready"
Of course "ready" should be "reading".
The software-portion that you mention is really the font-hinting code. It is written in a special-purpose language which runs on a VM in the font redering engine. Being a program, it is subject to all kinds of IP restritcions. Actually rather than copyright, it is protected by the much stronger patent law. A good reference for the background is the FreeType Patent Page.
As for copyrights, I was under the impression that a typeface could be protected under copyright as it is an artistic expression. Does anybody have a good reference page for copyright?
Quark still doesn't have a Mac OS X version... I'd rather see Adobe InDesign for Linux (not with a crappy Wine port the way Corel ported the CorelDRAW suite.)
:)
Port you apps to Linux Adobe, and I'll be a loyal customer for life
.:diatonic:.
I'm a Linux newbie and have toyed around with Redhat 7.3 and Mandrake 8.
One thing that I find unbearable is that in both Netscape and Mozilla for Linux sometimes you load a webpage and the fonts are friggin miniscule, I mean like 4 point!
Why does that happen? I can deal with an ugly font but not if I need an electron microscope to read it.
Those fonts are fucking beautiful! These people make truly splendid fonts!
one step closer to becoming a reality...and without dependency on fonts copied over from a winbloze partition...
My subjective experience using the Xft stuff under Linux is that hinting does still matter at screen resolutions. Even with anti-aliasing enabled, there is a noticeable difference in quality using the same hinted TT font when bytecode interpretation is switched off in the Freetype library. Note that when bytecode interpretation is turned off, the autohinter is used, but hand-coded TT hinting is still superior.
You mean aside from having advocated it in various magazine articles I've written, released a reasonable amount of sourcecode, and actively encouraged people to use it?
What? No Cyrillic? That's really sad.
Thanks to Microsoft, we have their free webfonts.
I couldn't help but laugh upon noticing that the announcement about pretty fonts was made in "pre" (i.e. courier) style. Lovely.
TELL me that this is not how these fonts are laid out in GNOME. There are no hints and no kerning. Look at the capital 'V' followed by the lower-case 'e'. See the big ugly space between them? This is not how a high-quality font should look. Yet all three fonts do this, which tells me that either Bitstream dumped fonts with no kerning pairs and hinting on GNOME, or whatever this program was doesn't know how to draw them properly. ...just waiting to see them handled in a system that knows what it's doing, like a MacOS X Coco app...
Which their license specifically prohibits sale.
So the Microsoft web fonts can't be bundled and sold as part of a Linux (or other) distro.
The point here is to have some good fonts so that we look good "out of the box" until additional fonts are available. Right now, we don't...
It appears that their Web search engine is NOT opensource. When I did a search for the vera fonts, I received the following message from their search engine:
"The license is not valid for www.bitstream.com!
Please contact info@anet.at."
As for copyrights, I was under the impression that a typeface could be protected under copyright as it is an artistic expression. Does anybody have a good reference page for copyright?
From my research, it seems that is not 100% true. The issue comes down to the words and the fonts which means the layout is the thing that becomes copyrightable, rather than just the typeface. The reason Apple has so successfully challenged people using their "standard" font base is because they argue that the layout of the words and the look of those said words are copyright.
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
I thought Linux was a kernel...
>There is also some work on hinting, etc, to finish up.
It's good to know we'll be getting a set of manually hinted fonts. But what about those of us (possibly the majority?) who have TrueType bytecode hinting disabled in our FreeType builds? Do these glyphs render well when hinted with FreeType's autohinter?
It would be a shame for the fonts to work well only when the patented bytecode interpretter is enabled in FreeType...
Let me guess, all of the fonts look like Times New Roman.
Since when did asking a question of the user on installation become nerdy?
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
The fonts look pretty good even with the Freetype hinter turned off: part of the reason why is that we do anti-aliasing these days. And the autohinter in freetype continues to improve (which also avoids the patents).
And Linux is even more important/likely to get to serious volume in parts of the world where the TrueType patents do not apply: they are only US and Britain.
standard Microsoft fonts (e.g. Arial). This is
one of the key problems when trying to export
files from Open Office to an MS Word user - the
fonts end up not matching correctly and things
look funny.
You will never see the end of that chase because MicroSoft is not consistent. M$ does not display consitently from one version of windoze to the next and the way things print on M$ will vary with identical setups using different printers. The whole set up is a cluster bang of propriatory font nightmare. Don't count on M$ to do anything co-operative for you. Just look at their refusal to work with portable net graphics as an example of where Microsoft would rather stick to stuff they can break than adopt useful patent and royalty free standards.
If you need to share with a doze user, just print out to post script or pdf. Adobe made those specifications to avoid the nighmare you are in. If you are trying to build content together, just do it in text and then typeset the thing when you are finished. Good luck.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Nuff said.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Joel is usually right when he talks about managing software projects. He clearly has a shit aesthetic sense, and is talking out of his ass on this one.
Other posts indicate that Bitstream is releasing a family of three related typefaces, adapted from Prima: Vera, Vera Sans, and Vera Sans Mono. This is terrific, as they look much better matched than Times, Arial, and Courier.
Unfortunately, Vera Sans Mono does not seem to include an italic or a bold italic. Even if the italic is a simple slant, it looks better than letting the computer butcher it. I like to have a slant mono for commands in headings:
I wouldn't necessarily use that design in a manual, but it's a natural for a quick stylesheet that you might use with DocBook.I've always wondered why some companies seem so touchy about fonts. It's not like they are that special. Why can't I copy a font from one computer to another?
What is the problem with linux distros just copying the standard Windows fonts into their distros? For most people, the standard Times New Roman looks just fine. And there really doesn't seem to be that much difference between various fonts that I've seen. Some are spaced a little more, while others may have sharper corners, but they all look vaguely the same.
Well, if modern anti-aliased fonts looked the way they do in the example Joel does on that web page, I would agree with him. Thankfully, the state of AA text has moved beyond that. The AA text on my MacOS X desktop is very, very readable, more readable than non-AA text. He also used the wrong tool for the job. According to him, he used Corel PHOTO-PAINT to make that sample. If I'm not mistaken, that's a photo-enhancement/editing program, probably not well suited for text work. Likely it uses the same algorithm for AA-ing text as it does for lines and shapes. It looks like it simply over-samples the text and shrinks it down using a bicubic or bilinear algo. That's fine for making artwork look anti-aliased, but extremely naive for text. Modern AA techniques treat edges carefully and use font hints in order to reduce blurryness. If you look closely at a modern text AA algo, you'll notice it will avoid putting greys on perfectly vertical or horizontal lines, leaving a sharp edge. It will apply greys mostly to rounded or diagonal lines and shapes. This avoids making the letters look 'thick' and blurry.
Of course, that article was written August 2000. A lot of work on antialiased text has been done since then. I believe the method Apple used for OSX 10.0, available at the time the article was written (though he doesn't mention it) was replaced in 10.1. Apple also lets you tweak the AA settings, offering Light, Medium and Strong settings.
Fonts are harder to "get" than anyone who doesn't truly understand fonts would know.
FYI:
apt-get install msttcorefonts
does wonders for a stock debian install..
yeah.. dark side, but their fonts are nice (except Comic Sans.. I HATE that font).
S
...which in french means "Female Pig".
I let Kathleen Fent give me a blow job. Oh, you said "*nix", not "ugly buck-toothed bitches"
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I hate people like you : all talk, no walk.
I am writing this on XP. Why? Because although I use Linux for my server and have Linux desktops I can't make the break with MS totally. Why because Linux fonts are so ugly and hard to read that I get eye strain.
.02 cents.
I think alot a potential users are turned off by the sloppy appearance of Linux on the screen.
This is but one step in the direction of having Linux more accepted on the desktop. Redhat understands this. That is why Bluecurve was created. It still isn't good enough but it is better. If Openoffice and Mozilla out of the box can use these new fonts then you might have something to kill Windows with.
Just my worthless
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
We could sure use some new fonts. Three cheers for Bitstream! Remember the horrors of trying to get True-Type fonts to work with Star Office 5? If you never had the experience I assure you that it was truly horrendous. Yaay!
Clickety Click
Awesome! Thank you Bitstream!
joel's cool, but his examples on this issue are crap.
He obviously doesn't understand subpix sampling on lcd screens for instance. Cleartype and similar are a godsend and improve my font resolution like 5x.
I wont go back now =)
#6495ED - cornflower blue
I have to say that what Linux really needs is a free top-notch vector font editor, something along the lines of Fontographer.
You mean, like pfaedit? It's almost a carbon copy of Fontographer, and very good it is for editing fonts too.
The tools (pfaedit) have been usable for about 18 months though, but still no-one is having a serious go at fixing fonts. I don't think people realise just how much time and effort goes into a font. My day job is as a graphic designer, I draw things all day, mostly using vector graphics, so I like to think I have a handle on what I'm doing and I can draw with curves quicker than most. In a past life I put together a couple of typefaces for a corporate client, and this is from my experience of that (I used Fontographer to begin with, then switched to Fontlab later on because Fontographer can't do TrueType hinting worth a damn - I do wish pfaedit had cloned Fontlab).
To go from nothing but an idea to a set of outlines covering iso-8859-1, that's about 4-5 days of solid full-time work - for a fairly simple sans-serif font in regular weight - add another day each for bold, italic and bold italic, add some more on if it's a more complicated style of typeface. Getting the kerning (spacing between characters) right is another couple of days work if you want it perfect.
Then, the nightmare part - hinting. Hinting... let's just say it's about as fun as pulling teeth without anaesthetic. To get good results on-screen, you need to allow about 2-3 hours - per character. If you want it to work correctly on more than one platform, double that. Fortunately lots of characters in the iso-8859-1 set are compound, formed of a letter and various accents and so forth, so you can just copy and paste these, but still you can easily end up spending several weeks on it - and it's the most unrewarding, boring and soul-destroying work I've ever done. Then repeat for bold, italic and bold italic.
It's all very well saying that people will re-hint dodgy fonts for fun, but you try it and see how long you last before giving up and going back to something rewarding, like writing an IRC client or GIMPing together a new wallpaper. I hope FreeType's autohinter everntually gets good enough that we can just give up on hinting.
Please see my previous post. You've done nothing to refute anything I said. One can spend all day punching a retard and telling him not to shit himself but at the end of the day, the retard isn't going to stop shitting himself.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
are they releasing, anyway? I might be going blind, but I didn't find any indication in the article.
UGLY fonts? wth? wtf? you look at letters instead of reading them?
apt-get install mozilla galeon mozilla-xft fontconfig libxft2
both mozilla and galeon will look great.
hyperpoem.net
Because Gnome go out try to solve the font problem for the community while KDE just trying to promot QT for Trolls?
If you are looking for professional level publishing on Linux, be sure to check out Scribus.
Scribus is a completely free (as in freedom) publishing program that works very much like Quark.
Check it out here:
http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/about.html
It's actually only two fonts, but they have lots of letters.
A beta open source "project"?! No way!
How much time could you save if you forgot about hinting? After all, Apple owns that patent and won't let Free Software use TTF hinting anyway.
So if in fact the n is 4.6 pixels wide, there will be .4 width added for every n in the line.
This can play havoc with the poor secretary trying to get wysiwyg. MicroSoft has done some nasty stuff like space the letters on the printer on integer screen pixels to make it match. But they had to abandon this as other software started producing obviously better output on the same devices. So I believe they have been forced to give up on hinting in order to get nice-looking display that is also WYSIWYG. Apple seems to have decided to do the same thing. And due to Apple's patents it looks like Linux is doing the same thing from the start.
When finished, they will go under a copyright which allows you (roughly) to fold, spindle, and mutilate the fonts, so long as you change the name to something else, and you can sell them so long as you don't sell them by themselves. You can sell them with any software whatsoever. You can freely redistribute the fonts anywhere, anytime, unmodified under that name.
:)
What's funny about this is that you can do this now legally without any agreement. I can make an indentical font face ( not an identical copy mind you, be creative here (unless I read the law wrong)) of any font and even sell it as long as it's named different. This is under current copyright law. (dating back to the old days of the print press where the US colony wanted free reign of British and other's fonts
The simple fact that no fonts were "made", or modified from other good fonts, sooner than now and distributed (as there's no copyright protection for "font faces") is mind boggling...
References? Anonymous Coward wants references...
It seems to be little-known fact that fonts and typefaces are not protected by copyright.
That's because this is not quite correct. You should read the site you link to more closely.
There are two separate areas of copyright on a computer font, relating to the design (the shape of the letters), and the vector data - and name - that describes this design.
In the US, the design of a typeface cannot be copyrighted, but the data and name that describes this design can be. Thus, for instance, Monotype can claim copyright over their implementation of Arial, so if you simply copy the .ttf font file without their permission, you are in breach of copyright law. However, if you print out each character of the font extra-large and then scan and trace the shapes to make a new font with a different name, you are okay - in the process of tracing the shape, you have created an original work. This is why there are so many cheap knock-offs of popular typefaces with subtly different names to the original. Funnily enough given the nature of this story, Bitstream are notorious for doing this.
I don't think your idea of creating bitmaps from a scalable font to avoid copyright would pass muster, because you have merely translated the copyrighted data from one form to another - no different to converting the font from TrueType to Type1, for instance. You haven't created an original work.
Note that this rather strange situation only applies to the US - just about everywhere else that enforces copyright allows designers to copyright typeface designs as well as the data that describes the design, so if you make a knock-off of a non-US designer's typeface, you might find yourself in hot water.
Interestingly, the situation dates from the early years of American independence when all the commonly-used typeface designs were owned by foreigners and there was a shortage of skilled typographers to create distinctive American typefaces. To get around this problem, the fledgling US Patent Office simply declared typeface designs uncopyrightable, thus sparing US printers some stiff royalties. Ahhh the irony...
It interesting that the lack of copyright protection has apparently not hindered the creation of a wide variety of fonts.
True, but it should be noted that almost all the important typefaces of the last 200 years have been designed outside of the US... Times, Helvetica, Gill Sans, Futura, Eurostile, Rotis, Palatino, these typefaces are the backbone of modern design, and none of them came from the US.
No they can't, not in the US anyway.
typeright.org: "The US Copyright Office still officially refuses to accord protection for typeface designs."
There are licensing and trademark issues, but not copyright. As the poster said, the lawyer works on intimidation, not actually getting judgements. (Unless the DMCA has radically changed this, which is possible as it seems to have all kinds of unintended consequences.)
I beg to differ:
1) fonts include programs internally these days.
2) I believe this applies to the shape of the glyphs, not te bag of bits. So you can build fonts that look like some other fonts, but not just take the bits as is.
This is how you get Times New Roman that looks like Times Roman. Someone built a font from scratch that looks the same.
So copyright law does not protect the shapes of characters themselves against mimicry, as it does with, say, the design of Micky Mouse, to pick a notorious example.
But is far from what a font file is these days...
At least this is my understanding of the state of US law.
You should be able to embed the fonts in the document so that the windows user sees exactly what you do.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Change your keyboard so 'a' and 's' aren't next to each other.
No sir.
:-)
In French, a "verrat" is a MALE pig.
Vera is a nice first name for women (maybe Russian origin).
Anonymous Frenchie coward
I thank you, and the other folks who replied here, for your explanations. I'll have to reexamine my opinion. I do, however believe that Joel had a point with regard to fonts designed for the screen. Sans Serif fonts, especially those designed to account for pixel-based representations tend to look cleaner, and less distracting than fonts not so designed.
However, my experience with displayed fonts is limited to Windows and Linux. On Linux, I can't bring myself to use Open Office (although AbiWord is not bad), because I find the fonts to be such a distraction. I resort to Emacs for text editing and then find some way to format it afterward (usually as an HTML document). At some point I'll have to try OSX.
Thanks again.
In case you didn't know, font also means a receptacle for baptismal water, source, fountain, as well as a set of types of one style (the story was about type fonts, but I chose to "mis-understand" it to make some, apperantly lame, joke.)
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
That is why I said "duplicate" (which was a poor choice of words) and not exact copy... You are right, I can't take the actual font file of "Times" and rename it "bob font" and sell it... you couldn't do that before anyways...
But what is unclear to me is how much of the font file "times" I would have to change before I could call my own...
As with photo manipulation, I can take someone else's photo and manipulate it to the point where it is so unique that I could call mine at that point without fear of copyright infringment.
But with a font not having copyright protection like a photo or an illustration would, then the amount of manipulation needed to make it mine might very well be close to nothing...
The really funny thing is
1) that there still seems to be a strong font industry as I can literally find thousands of font to purchase
2) there are plenty of free fonts out there for the public to use
An odd conclusion? Perhaps copyright law all together is pointless as the only people who can really truly enforce the copyright of their own work are those with the money for the lawyers.
I personally could never enforce it... so copyright protection for me is as good as non-existant.
This is where I find it ironic that there's a movement to push font IP into a new law... why? Who is doing this? People like me that even if the law was there wouldn't help me? No, it's being pushed by people with tons of money that once the law is enacted that they can let their lawyers loose...
I wouldn't buy into it, I like not being afraid of accidently using the wrong font, or asking a client to send me a font to work on their stuff, if I had to buy every font I ever used to work on my client's material, I would be broke...
-v
The whole "M$" and "windoze" thing is lame. You're as bad as the trolls who post things like "LUNIX SUXORS." Stop being a child OR, and this is the option I would prefer for you, don't post to Slashdot anymore.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.