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Bitstream To Donate 10 Fonts To Free Software World

Posted by timothy on from the some-gnus-is-good-gnus dept.

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.

7 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) by King+Babar · · Score: 5, Informative
    Anyway, here's the only screenshot of the newly free fonts I could find. Now, in an attempt to be nice to this guy's server, I'll make you cut and paste this one:

    http://tieguy.org/fonts.png

    Pretty decent stuff, in my opinion.

    --

    Babar

  2. Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing by fault0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Six months ago, I'd would have agreed with you that font rendering (especially AA) in X was not up to font rendering in Windows. However, since then, Xft2 has come out, which offers even better sub-pixel antialiasing support than Microsoft Cleartype. I'm currently running xft2+XFree86 4.2.99 on gentoo, and the fonts look better on my lcd than in WindowsXP.

  3. Re:10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Informative
    The microsoft world does very well with ARIAL, COURIER, and TIMES NEW ROMAN.

    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.

  4. Re:10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm a doofus. Monotype Corporation made Arial.

  5. STIX Fonts by white-mj · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Why aren't there more good Free fonts already? by DuBois · · Score: 5, Informative
    As the first manager of support for Fontographer, I can attest to the fact that it takes a lot longer to make a quality font than you might think if you've just fiddled with Fontographer a bit. You can make a simple, low quality font in a couple of hours. To make a publication-ready font probably takes a month at least; three months for one that is completely hinted with all the Eurpean characters, etc. etc. etc. etc.

    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.
  7. Some information/clarification about the agreement by jg · · Score: 5, Informative
    Ok, folks, here a bit more information for you.


    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?sea rc htext=Prima


    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.