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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.
Also, if it's open source, why it is "long term"? They said "special license" but they didn't post the license itself.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Actually, I've always thought that the big advantage of Windows antialiasing is that it turns off when the text is small enough. Every time I try to enable the antialiasing in FreeBSD/Linux, I discover that the mechanism to disable antialiasing below a certain pixel size is either broken or nonfunctional. Antialiasing small text makes it fuzzy and hard to read.
As a caveat, some people always hate antialising. Even in Windows they dive right for the "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts" checkbox. All programs that antialias should include a simple method for disabling it, or you are going to annoy some of your users.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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?
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
That said, the notion of a "Bitstream Vera" font is rather obscure on the net according to google. There *is* a set of multilingual fonts that go under the "Vera Humana" name; maybe Bitstream bought or adapted these? So where are the font experts when you need them? :-)
Babar
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'?
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?)
cheapskatefonts.com All released under GPL, all designed by yours truely.
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:.
>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...
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.
Yes, actually it looks like no kerning at all. Kerning is usually a function of the application, not the OS. Word, for instance, in different versions had working or broken pair kerning. That's one reason you use a DTP app (Ventura, Pagemaker, etc) instead of a word processor.