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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.
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)
http://tieguy.org/fonts.png
Pretty decent stuff, in my opinion.
Babar
Indeed, and according to Fontilus Bitstream were the people who made these fonts.
I think people don't realise how hard it is to make good fonts. Arial is a huge project in and of itself, simply getting the fonts looking good at all sizes is hard, and then you need glyphs for other languages and alphabets.
It's hard. 10 fonts is an amazing gift, if they are of high quality. I think they will be, Bitstream are good.
I'm a doofus. Monotype Corporation made Arial.
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.
Mozilla does support AA, you just have to enable it with a hidden preference. Debian (and probably some other distros) does that by default.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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
But Your Mileage May Vary, and it's been awhile since I've actually made a font (1993 was the last time I went throught the complete process).
If you want a complete Unicode font, well, then all bets are off, since those can be huge.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
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.
Enjoy
mp3: l33t term for empty.
Wow, all three of your points are incorrect. Adobe didn't 'hijack' Postscript, in fact they invented it in the first place. Secondly, PDF files are not really all that similar to Postscript, except that they are both page description formats. And lastly, PDF is actually less 'proprietary' than Postscript. This was the reason why Apple ported the NeXT stuff over from Display Postscript to Quartz (really Display PDF), so that they wouldn't have to pay a license fee to Adobe. Postscript was a godsend in its day, but PDF is much better.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
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.