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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.

6 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. 10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. by Vengie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)
    1. Re:10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. by Eightlines · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Amen. I think the cynicism in these messages is uncalled for. Bitstream at one time produced a great product that embedded fonts into the website while making sure they were restricted to the domain they were posted on. They've shown awareness of Type Designers copyright priveledges. They led the way to a W3C proposal. And now I have to read comments about the possibility of the fonts being released being "crappy"?

      Months ago another font article was written about MS pulling their fonts from their site. The /. crowd wrote that more people should create fonts and release them to the opensource community. Now that we are getting them this is what you respond with?

      10 Fonts (not typefaces, fonts - there is a difference) that are properly designed can take years to produce. There is no science behind fonts, its an art. Its something type designers take very seriously and its a whole different geek culture. Sure we have Arial, Courier, Helvetica, but one typeface is not good in all cases. Think about how many different typefaces you have seen in Newspapers, TV, Film, etc. For each their own purpose. If people can learn to apply the styles of good typography to their projects then we all benefit through better legibility, readability, and aesthetic means.

      Personally, I really hope one of the fonts is Stone.

  2. The best thing would be: by pyite69 · · Score: 4, Insightful


    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.

  3. Re:What's the point? by FooBarWidget · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem isn't free fonts, the problem is high-quality and Free (as in freedom) fonts. Sure you can download I don't know how many free beer fonts from the net, but they are either 1) not freely redistributable or 2) for fun only; not optimized for actual ready or 3) low-quality.

    BitStream is donating high-quality AND Free fonts here! So soon we will get Linux distros with high-quality fonts out-of-the-box.

  4. Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing by BrookHarty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm currently running xft2+XFree86 4.2.99 on gentoo, and the fonts look better on my lcd than in WindowsXP.

    The big difference, In Windows any application will use AA fonts by default. In Linux, your application needs to have AA compiled in via a supported method. Gentoo does this better, as its a source based distro, you configure it yourself. Redhat has to precompile the source with AA enable (via its supported methods).

    Lots of dependencies on Linux, makes it is much more difficult to enable and use AA fonts. Also helps if you know what methods to enable, and configurations. (I dont have them, do you? Is your method the best? Is it a hack? Was it the correct supported procedure? Did it break anything?) Ugh. Good job for Redhat for trying to make it easy for the average/newbie linux user.

  5. pfaedit? by marm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.