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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.
... 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.
If you're using RH8, you already have AA fonts. Mozilla might not have them, tho - that'll be rectified in future releases of Mozilla.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Who care's. We have them either way.
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.
When this story becomes a repost in about 8 hours?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
http://tieguy.org/fonts.png
Pretty decent stuff, in my opinion.
Babar
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.
8. West Wingdings
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
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."
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 fonts problems on linux really blow away many people from using linux, but with a little configuring you can get them to look just as nice as in windows. Currently there are many enhancements happening in the linux font rendering.
But as everything nowadays, the developers are having patent issues. The deal is that in order to have nice looking fonts (at least with the current fonts that are available) you have to use the BCI (Byte Code Interpreter), wich is patented, so many distros do not distribute freetype compiled with the BCI turned on (some distros don't care about it and turn the BCI on anyway, I assume this is what happens with redhat). And even when BCI is turned on, some distros really do a lousy job when configuring the fonts.
I have mozilla running with fonts exactly like they look in windows (i did compare the fonts using vmware and they really are exactly the same) but I did have to configure many things. If you are willing to do this too check the Gentoo Forums. Unlike what happens on other Linux distros comunities, the gentoo users don't give up until they've got it like they want (and don't mind sharing their work), so you'll probably won't have a hard time getting help in the gentoo community.
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?
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
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
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.
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'?
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
redhat 8.0 does have some nice fonts but generally the fonts used in the mozilla browsing experience just suck!
.
Try installing the XFT version of Mozilla
It's very easy to install, and looks amazing! It pains me to use any other browser on any platform. And I used to *hate* Mozilla's fonts.
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.
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
Here, download these RPMS from mozilla, and you'll be a happy camper.
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:.
Enjoy
mp3: l33t term for empty.
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...
Linux apps will keep sucking as long as each and every app does font rendering its own goddamned way. The app should tell the server what fucking text to render and where, and the server should anti-alias it and render it, and we should toss out the old apps that use the antiquated X rendering system to draw glyphs in the X client. Then just focus on making Xft/FreeType rock.
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.
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.
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.
The current Slackware has them too. So does Mozilla, but you have to compile it with --enable-xft (IIRC), but check out fixes here.
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 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.)