Slashdot Mirror
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.
You know you're a geek when you get excited about the release of new fonts.
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)
Linus is not very good at displaying the fonts
I don't think you can directly blame him :)
http://tieguy.org/fonts.png
Pretty decent stuff, in my opinion.
Babar
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.