Bitstream/Gnome Release Vera Font Family

bluephone writes "Gnome and Bitstream have released the final version of the Vera font family. Go get it, install them, and enjoy! They work for Windows and Mac users too!" Our earlier story.

Comments

word

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using them right now, and they're simply beautiful. I suggest someone mirrors them before the site is slashdotted...

Re:word

[Anonymous Coward]

.detseuqer sA

Re:word

[frisket]

Good goddess, is that the best they can do? Parturiunt montes. Not only is it a boring, ugly typeface, it's a sans-serif, and the last thing we need is more boring ugly sans typefaces. Given the effort they are supposed to have put into this, I would have thought the least they could have done is some up with something original.

Re:word

[spongman]

I don't know. I'm not too impressed.

Here's a comparison of Vera Serif/Sans with Times/Verdana on Windows XP with ClearType at 8 & 12 points (96 dpi): vera.gif.

A few things stand out:

• vera serif is much bigger than times. it's a bit taller, but it's a whole lot wider.
• the kerning (spacing between letters) is bad on the vera fonts. for example, check serif's 'az', 'he', 'um', and sans' 'ox', 'og', 'RO'.
• the kerning is inconsistent between font sizes, too. check sans' 'WN'. in the small size they're crammed up against each other and in the larger size they're miles apart.
• in the large serif, what happened to the space between 'FOX' and 'JUMPS'?

Re:word

[KilerCris]

Umm, I don't think you get the point. It's free . No royalties, no nothing. It's a good, professional-looking typeface that can be used without restriction.

Make Vera Open Source!

[Anonymous Coward]

It would greatly benefit the Open Source developer community!

Re:Make Vera Open Source!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is. You can modify them, as long as you change the name from Vera to something else. Read the license documentation.

YAY

[Sevn]

New fonts are like christmas. It's like getting a
new version of your favorite mp3 player or P2P
client with new stuff added. Free stuff rules.

Re:YAY

[Anonymous Coward]

Are linux geeks really THAT font starved?

I'm obviously retarded

[AssFace]

I followed the links in the article and glanced over it and even searched on Bitstream's own site using their font finder...

I just want to see what the fonts look like without having to install/download the actual files.

I'm sure that it would be far too silly for them to have all of this talk and not have a link that shows what they look like - so I'm obviously retarded for not finding said link.

Anyone want to help a special needs kid and give me a link to what the font looks like?

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Ponty]

They're a Verdana clone. Which is too bad, bacause Verdana just isn't as good a font as it could be.

It's a great move and a nice thing, but it's not the panacea of fonts (like Helvetica is.)

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[AssFace]

Yes, but neither can match the beauty of Wingdings.

I use that badboy for everything.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[ebingo]

Yeah you're retarded :)
Here's a link.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[13Echo]

It isn't a Verdana clone. There are a total of 10 fonts making for four sets. There are different types; serif, sans, and mono. Some look like a Times set. Some look like an Arial set. Some look similar to Verdana.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[insin]

I've made it my default font in Phoenix and it's a lot smoother than Verdana. I find it to be much easier on the eye and more pleasant to read.

Here's a comparison (Verdana above, Vera below):
Verdana and Vera

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[bogie]

Verdana is still my favorite. Its what I use for my entire desktop and browser. I've tried a bunch of fonts and in linux over the years and its still the one I think looks best in most cases.

I guess I'll try out the Vera final though. I had tried out the beta but there were some problems with it, hopefully they are all fixed now.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Ponty]

It is better than Verdana, but I find them both to be quite difficult to read. I can't fathom tolerating the amount of time I spend reading a browser every day if I had to use either of those.

My preferred font is Lucida Grande, followed closely by Helvetica.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Ponty]

The serif faces aren't all that much like Times, really. The roman one is reminiscent of a looser Century Schoolbook, while the bold actually reminds me of Bodoni. It's a nice font, just not that compelling.

The mono face is the most interesting. It reminds me of an interesting fusion of Monaco and Andale Mono. It does the job well, and I might try using it for something where I need a monospaced font.

The rest really aren't all that special.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I couldn't stand to read that. Way too blurry. Did you have anti-aliasing on, or is that the actual font?

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Foogle]

The monospaced version of Vera reminds me quite a bit of Lucida Console.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

My preferred font is Lucida Grande, followed closely by Helvetica.

For screen-reading, have you tried Georgia? It's surprisingly easy on the eyes. I have Safari set to display it at 14 pt. Also, it's got those old-style numerals, and that's just cool.

Generally, I find serif fonts to be a lot less tiring over the long haul than sans-serif fonts.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Pingo]

Yes, I also find Vera easy on the eye. // Pingo

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[CoolVibe]

Yeah, they work a treat in Konq and KDE as well... I'm addicted! The monospace Vera font is also scrumptious. I'm using it in Konsole and it's great.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[varslot]

It certainly works wonders for Slashdot flames!

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[jonadab]

here is a screenshot showing the three fonts. The mono font looks pretty good as boldface in gnome-terminal. I could live with this as a replacement for Andale Mono. The serif font I basically don't care about, because I normally have very little use for serif fonts, but it's certainly better than Times New Roman, albeit arguably not as nice in some ways as Georgia. Like I said, it's really hard for me to say, because I'm just not a fan of serifs in general. The sans font is not as good IMO as Verdana or Adobe helvetica.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[repetty]

"I've made it my default font in Phoenix and it's a lot smoother than Verdana. I find it to be much easier on the eye and more pleasant to read."

You realize that what your are mostly comparing is aliased versus anti-aliased font rendering, don't you? :)

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[antiMStroll]

I was able to achieve the same result on my notebook by playing with the sub-pixel rendering options in X. Nothing scientific, just go through the options one at a time looking for the best result.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash: antialiasing makes fonts look smoother!

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash: antialiasing makes fonts look blurrier!

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[gaseous troll]

Kind of off-topic, but do you know what theme that is for mozilla in that screenshot?

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

Good lord! Please tell me you're blind and actually rely on a screen-reader, and that screenshot is just a practical joke!

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[FunkyChild]

Verdana's a very good font - for it's purpose. It was designed by Matthew Carter specifically for use on screen - the emphasis is on function, not form. Have a look at these articles that explain some of the rationale behind the design:

http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/verd ana/default.htm

There's no 'panacea of fonts'. Any typographer knows that different typefaces are appropriate in different situations.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Ponty]

Oh, I know. I've spent enough time with typefaces to have a good handle on the nuance of the field. In fact, it gives me quite a thrill. And I understand the balance between form and function. I just think that there can be more of a balance -- Verdana simply isn't an appealing font to my eye. Neither is Georgia, for that matter. I appreciated the need for generous character widths and tall x-heights, but they leave me aesthetically flat.

If you care, some fonts that truly curl my toes are Helvetica, Futura, Garamond, Apple's beautiful Hoefler, and Helvetica again. All beautiful, functional fonts. And for truly functional fonts that have great art to them, Monaco and Lucida Grande.

Re:I'm obviously retarded

[Ponty]

Oh, I know. I've spent enough time with typefaces to have a good handle on the nuance of the field. In fact, it gives me quite a thrill. And I understand the balance between form and function. I just think that there can be more of a balance -- Verdana simply isn't an appealing font to my eye. Neither is Georgia, for that matter. I appreciated the need for generous character widths and tall x-heights, but they leave me aesthetically flat.

If you care, some fonts that truly curl my toes are Helvetica, Futura, Garamond, Apple's beautiful Hoefler, and Helvetica again. All beautiful, functional fonts. And for truly functional fonts that have great art to them, Monaco and Lucida Grande.

heres some images of vera

[hfastedge]

I did a little googlage:

http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fon ts /vera/

Re:heres some images of vera

[Anonymous Coward]

And clickable. You know, it's not _that_ hard, and it helps a lot - particularly with these long links that introduce spaces in plain text...

Re:heres some images of vera

[objekt]

You must be using IE on a Mac, which introduces spaces in long URLs.

Re:heres some images of vera

[Fishstick]

uh, no -- slash does that to stop page-widening trolls, IIRC

Re:heres some images of vera

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know where I can get redhat 8.0 rpms of freetype 2.1.4?

Re:heres some images of vera

[yerricde]

clickable. You know, it's not _that_ hard, and it helps a lot

Some HTTP servers will 403 (forbid) any request where the Referer contains "slashdot.org". One such server has the initials b.m.o.

Re:heres some images of vera

[objekt]

my bad

Re:heres some images of vera

[Anonymous Coward]

you're stupid. Slashdot introduces spaces into any long string of text so that the text loops instead of widening the page; something trolls used to do.

Windows port?

[Anonymous Coward]

So will these fonts become available for Windows? I would dearly love to to have a good non-MS alternative for Verdana...

Re:Windows port?

[dorward]

So will these fonts become available for Windows?

Now. Download, extract the tarball, drop the ttfs into your fonts directory.

Re:Windows port?

[Simon (S2)]

"They work for Windows and Mac users too!"

did you read the summary?

Re:Windows port?

[Anonymous Coward]

What??! We're supposed to read the articles as well now!!?
*grins* I never do actually. I just click the links and read the articles. :-D

But yeah, oops! That was not one of my smarter comments!

Re:Windows port?

[PhoenixK7]

Works perfectly on my Mac OS X box, just dropped the files in my ~/Library/Fonts

Re:Windows port?

[13Echo]

It should be noted that the Vera font sets use very minimal delta hinting, as the documentation states. They are designed with the future of Freetype in mind, and traditional OSX and Windows (Cleartype) may not render them as nicely as they would on a standard Unix/Linux machine. Don't even think about using them without antialiasing, because the glyphs wil render horibly. ;)

That said, in a few years, when everyone is on LCD displays and are using subpixel hinting, these fonts will look their absolute finest. Freetype seems to be gearing for the future, and may soon be the best looking antialiasing library on any platform.

Re:Windows port?

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

Hmm, I downloaded both the .tar and .gz files, but winzip just gives me an "invalid header after processing 0 entries" error.

should I use something else to extract them? If so, what?

Re:Windows port?

[Bander]

You probably got a spurious .tar added after the filename. Check the filename before attempting to open it with Winzip. If the name is "blahblah.tar.gz.tar", just delete the last .tar from the name and try again.

HTH

-- Bander

Re:Windows port?

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

That was it. Thanks Bander.

Re:Windows port?

[dmadole]

It should be noted that the Vera font sets use very minimal delta hinting, as the documentation states. They are designed with the future of Freetype in mind, and traditional OSX and Windows (Cleartype) may not render them as nicely as they would on a standard Unix/Linux machine

Right you are. I got excited when I noticed it includes a monospaced version, because I'm always on the lookout for a new and better terminal emulator font.

I installed Vera on Windows 2K and the 8-point, my preferred telnet window size, looked absolutely like crap. Turned anti-aliasing (called "Smooth edges of fonts" for Windows dummies) on and it's nice.

I haven't liked the soft look of anti-aliased fonts in the past, which is why I had it off, but maybe I'll give this a try for a few days and see what happens.

Re:Windows port?

[Anonymous Coward]

traditional OSX and Windows (Cleartype) may not render them as nicely as they would on a standard Unix/Linux machine

Mac OS X is standard UNIX. Also: bullshit.

Re:Windows port?

[marmoset]

They look fine on OSX. I still prefer Lucida Grande, but I like Vera slightly better than Verdana.

Re:Windows port?

[IamTheRealMike]

MacOS is UNIX enough for Apple to get good marketing juice out of it, however it's different enough from most other forms of UNIX in terms of the components it uses to be rightfully excluded from this comparison. Actually, he should have really limited himself to free software platforms (ie Linux/FreeBSD/etc) because AFAIK no commercial unix except the new Solaris uses FreeType. MacOS certainly does not.

Re:Windows port?

[cpeterso]

I just downloaded the tarball and dropped the Vera .TTF files into my c:\windows\fonts directory. They didn't show up as an available font in any of my applications. I even rebooted (Windows user's last resort). Still no luck..

Do I need to "install" or "register" the new fonts some how?

Re:Windows port?

[Nerull]

One thing you can try is going to Control Panel - Fonts, that usualy picks up new fonts, at least IIRC.

.otf

[Anonymous Coward]

why no opentype? wasnt that meant to be the next big thing?

Re:.otf

[Jugalator]

why no opentype? wasnt that meant to be the next big thing?

Yes, I thought so as well...

TrueType info, OpenType info, TrueType vs OpenType FAQ.

The TrueType format was made by Apple. The OpenType format is an extension to TTF, adding support for PostScript font data and designed by Microsoft and Adobe with the following features:

- broader multi-platform support
- better support for international character sets
- better protection for font data
- smaller file sizes to make font distribution more efficient
- broader support for advanced typographic control

This sounds good, but remember MS was part of the design group and this is MS pages. I found this in the FAQ to look fishy in particular:

Q What does the OpenType initiative mean to Adobe's font business?

A The OpenType initiative represents a new opportunity for Adobe to expand its font business into the Windows market because Type 1 fonts will now work out of the box on all Windows systems. In addition, because Adobe will license TrueType technology, it will now be able to develop and market TrueType fonts.

So this could've been a "standard" created by Microsoft and not surprisingly supported by Adobe for the reasons in the FAQ entry I quote above. If that was the major reason for Adobe to support it, it looks more like MS did this "standard" on their own, hoping several others to license it and Adobe simply being an early adopter. I have no idea if this is as properly standardized as TrueType, or if it's more like an "Microsoft extension" which could explain why Bitstream/Gnome didn't want to support it.

Here's another FAQ entry:

Q What is being proposed to the World Wide Web Consortium?

A Adobe and Microsoft together will submit a proposal for Web page font embedding using OpenType to the W3C's working group on style sheets. --snip -- Ultimately we hope that this proposal, or a modified version of it, will be endorsed by the W3C as the standard way to use fonts on the Web.

The FAQ was never updated to say if W3C did indeed decide to endorse it as a standard for font embedding. If W3C instead decided to go for the much more common TTF format, thinking it should suffice, then that would be yet another reason to not use OpenType fonts.

Perhaps someone else has more insight into Bitstream's reasons not to use OpenType?

Re:.otf

[Crispy Critters]

Adobe and Microsoft together will submit a proposal for Web page font embedding using OpenType to the W3C's working group on style sheets.

This sounds like a really, really bad idea at first. It violates a fundamental principle of the web that presentation is to be controlled by the client. And web pages will become even more bloated with code and unusable over a slow connection.

But there is something that is good about it. When people want fruity fonts in their web pages today, they do it by puttin the text in images. This is unsearchable, both for search engines and the browser's search in page, and totally breaks text-only browsers. If there is a way to embed the font in the page, then the titles, links, whatever that the designer feels just have to be in new gothic outline copperplate will still be text in the html code. This is good.

Work on Windows?

[DrXym]

They don't for me. I double click on any .ttf file and XP complains "The requested file was not a valid font file.".

Re:Work on Windows?

[bencc99]

They work fine under XP here.

Re:Work on Windows?

[DrXym]

LOL, I solved my own problem. Cygwin's "tar jxf" command helpfully extracted the files without giving me permission to read them afterwards :)

Re:Work on Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open the fonts control panel and select install new font from the file menu. Then browse to the directory that the fonts are in and select them all.

You can find a more detailed instruction by feeding the xp help and support tool "installing fonts"

Re:Work on Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just extracted them with WinRAR. :-)

"tar jxf" my ass ;-)

Re:Work on Windows?

[the_2nd_coming]

you should download 7-zip.

it can tar/un-tar, un-rar, zip/unzip, gzip/bzip2/gunzip/bunzip, and does its own format..though there is little advantage over zip and it is a lot slower...

and all int he comfort of a windows program ;-)

This is good news...

[gillbates]

Considering that one of Linux/Gnome/KDE's weakest points has been its poor support for fonts.

Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this. The early fonts that came with X were simply horrible when compared to what MS was offering at the time. With better looking fonts, we are one step closer to widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop.

Re:This is good news...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are all small steps until I can buy any game at EB and play it on Linux, AND I am unable to pirate XP anymore. :P

Re:This is good news...

[OpCode42]

They are all small steps until I can buy any game at EB and play it on Linux

Yeah, that does suck. I mean, I bought Vice City last week, and they said I actually had to own a playstation2 to play it!

Re:This is good news...

[zmotula]

Still the sad thing about fonts in X is the poor rendering (even with antialiasing turned on) compared to Windows or MacOS X. Without antialias, cursive fonts are nearly unusable (at least on all the machines I work with). With antialias, the characters have got uneven brightness and fuzzy edges; horizontal lines are too thick (antialiased Mozilla being a perfect example)... Paint to look at.

Re:This is good news...

[iabervon]

Without anti-aliasing, scaled fonts are just terrible. It would be theoretically possible to have a nice bitmap cursive font, but somebody would have to sit down and tweak a whole lot of pixels for a whole lot of curves.

The anti-aliasing problems are probably due to either using a buggy version of freetype (like the one XFree86 4.3 came with), using an old version that didn't support as good an engine, or needing gamma correction. Fortunately, there are now skilled people working on the problem.

Re:This is good news...

[be-fan]

What sucks about X is not poor rendering (current mechanisms can give extremely high quality output, easily on a par with OS X for everything, and Windows for everything except maybe italics) but spotty availability. Not all distributions have it, and not all applications support it. However, if you run a straight Gnome-2 or KDE 3.x setup on a modern distro (Gentoo, Mandrake 9, RedHat 9, SuSE 8.2) and have a decent set of fonts (like Vera, the MS Core Fonts, or some commercial Adobe or Monotype fons) then your font quality should be top-notch.

Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[Maxlor]

click here

Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[13Echo]

Mind telling me what your Mozilla font settings are?

Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[Anonymous Coward]

Works perfecto here.

BTW, great idea and great community spirit. I congratulate you.

Take care.

Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[Maxlor]

It's opera 6.12 on FreeBSD 5.0, XFree 4.3 with fontconfig 2.1.92 and Xft 2.1

I use Bitstream Vera Serif 10pt as standard serif font, and the minimum font size is set to 8 points.

Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh! That's horrible. Here's vera looking 10 times better. Gotta love Xft2 and Phoenix (or Firebird, or whatnot).

Thats with the standard font set to sans-serif, witht he sans-serif set to Vera Sans. Funnily enough, monospace and serif are set to their appropriate Vera's.

Nice font, think I'll stick to it over arial. If you think I've got it set a little small it's because it's on a Dell laptop's lcd screen, and suits my positioning/eyesight just fine. The Phoenix theme is Breeze, GTK theme is a modified flaaat.

Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[LordNimon]

Why are the texts "submit story" and "bluephone" so close together? Is that a bug in Slashdot or the font rendering?

Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[mobets]

It is a bug in slashdot. I just looked at it in Mozilla and IE on WinXP and "submit story" was right up against the storeis on both of them.

Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy Christ. That's awful! If my computer ever looked like that, I'd run screaming from the building and forsake my geeky ways forever.

Get thee to a Mac immediately to see what on-screen text is supposed to look like, and then let that be your measuring rod.

Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif

[Phexro]

Too freaking small :)

At least, it looks that way on my 21"er at 1600x1200

404

[ChristTrekker]

Sorry, dude.

Re:404

[Maxlor]

Nah click again.

What hope?

[Anonymous Coward]

Web pages won't look right in them... I mean, just search google for The Best

Thanks, Jim!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks so much for this clever bit of Bitstream PR. It's good to see you of all people striving to raise X11 to the level of technique and aesthetic NeWS achieved in the late 1980's.

copyright, etc

[ergonal]

To me, a lot of fonts are pretty similar to each other (in the various "genres" of fonts, anyway).. Does anyone know HOW much they have to differ to avoid copyright issues, etc? It would appear to be a very fine line.

Re:copyright, etc

[n.wegner]

IANAL, AFAIK they have to have a different name/trademark, and they can't copy the font files. Having the same look is allowed.

Re:copyright, etc

[protoshoggoth]

In the US, it is not possible to copyright a 'font' itself--that is to say, the actual images of the letters. What is copyrighted and licensed is the software to display/hint the font. So all the usual tests for 'is this the same software' apply.

As for outside of the US, where the fonts themselves are copyrightable...well, I'm sure there are legal standards, and I'd imagine they're rather arbitrary. How could they not be? You're right, so many fonts look so similar. Quick--is it Univers or Albertus Medium??? I'm sure some people can tell, but I'd be hard-pressed to do so.

Re:copyright, etc

[sh4de]

Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.

Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.

That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.

Re:copyright, etc

[zsau]

At least in America, the fonts themselves are not copyright. It is the font file. I understand that if you wanted, you could print out your favorite font and use that to redesign the font and it'd all be perfectly legal, even if the outcome was identical. But you can't copy the font file without it being allowed. But IANAL. And I'm not American, either.

Re:copyright, etc

[mdemeny]

I recall that in old versions of CorelDraw, they had thousands of fonts which were nearly indentical to known fonts, exploiting the fact that you can't copyright letterforms.

Ottawa was Optima, Erie was Eras, Switzerland was Helvetica, etc...

Here's a handy-dandy lookup guide.

Re:copyright, etc

[raisin]

they don't have to differ at all. at least in the u.s., it's not possible to copyright the design of a font. as such, one can take the drawing of a typeface, reproduce the curves for it, then make and sell that font. this is where the libraries of "1000s OF FREE FONTS!" come from. (stealing the name of the font will likely run afoul of trademark or copyright laws, but not the design..)

this is at least part of the reason that fonts are *programs*, meaning that their instruction sets (moveto, lineto, and all the complex hinting commands) cannot simply be copied, as that would be analogous to piracy of a software program.

Re:copyright, etc

[liquidsin]

And now for some good, typical Slashdot fun, this site seems to think it was Microsoft who stole helvetica and made arial. There are some slight differences, as are outlined here.

Re:copyright, etc

[Webmonger]

It IS a very fine line-- you can copyright the font binary or the font source, but the appearance of the font cannot be copyrighted.

Re:copyright, etc

[MarsCtrl]

That's why there's Swiss [myfonts.com] from Bitstream and Arial [myfonts.com] from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica [myfonts.com] clones, Book Antiqua [myfonts.com] from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino [myfonts.com] clone, and hundreds of others.

IIRC, this was the motivation behind the naming of Apple's fonts. Rather than paying royalties to Linotype for their fonts, Apple created their own, and mimiced the names. Thus, Geneva from Helvetica, New York from Times, etc.

Re:copyright, etc

[Darth Yoshi]

Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name.

My understanding is that there was (is?) a concern that books printed with a particular font could be considered a derivative work (of that font). No, I don't understand that either, but then I'm not a lawyer.

On the other hand, centuries of experience has produced highly readable fonts for european languages (english, french, german, etc.). It might not be a good thing if one or two companies held the copyright to the shape of Times, Times-Roman, and Helvetica fonts for example. They could possibly control what gets printed in those fonts, everyone else would have to be printed in less-desireable, less-readable fonts. Just a thought.

Re:copyright, etc

[1u3hr]

IIRC, this was the motivation behind the naming of Apple's fonts. Rather than paying royalties to Linotype for their fonts, Apple created their own, and mimiced the names. Thus, Geneva from Helvetica, New York from Times, etc.

No, the Mac "city" fonts were all bitmap screen fonts. There were no screen vector fonts for the desktop -- this was before Truetype or ATM . When Adobe brought out ATM it was usually bundled with Adobe versions of Helvetica, Times, etc.

Later Truetype versions of the city fonts, Chicago in particular, were made, as people had a sentimental attachment to them. Also, Truetype screen fonts are often basically bundles of bitmaps for common sizes, and look crappy at non-standard sizes.

-- It took me a while to get how you derive "New York" from "Times"; then I remembered the NYT. Of course, the original "Times" font was designed for The Times of London.

Re:copyright, etc

[1u3hr]

My understanding is that there was (is?) a concern that books printed with a particular font could be considered a derivative work (of that font).

To begin with, copyright of fonts is pretty limited, and where it does exist, does not extend to the printed form (i.e., what ends up on paper, as opposed to the digital file).

However, this story may have a germ of truth as related to fonts embedded in digital files (PDFs mainly, though I believe you can do it with Word too). Many font licenses, if read literally, forbid such embedding -- and that's why there is a "embedding" bit in TrueType that is supposed to tell applications not to embed it. Fortunately, this is almost universally ignored in practice.

open/free font editors

[wfmcwalter]

On a related note, can anyone recommend a decent open source / free software graphical font design tool ? I looked into this a few years ago and things deemed to be in a crufty state of disarray. What do folks use now?

Re:open/free font editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Try pfaedit. The user interface is rather spartan but it is very powerful.

Re:open/free font editors

[Anonymous Coward]

http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/

Re:open/free font editors

[garbanzito]

according to this (German) article, there's a somewhat outdated Windows font tool, Manutius, that is now free

not open-source, but free, Adobe offers an OpenType Font Development Kit which is Python-based and runs on (at least) Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and some Windows versions.. i'm not sure how "graphical" it is

Re:open/free font editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Clickable link. Welcome to the 80s.

Screenshot.

[13Echo]

Here's a screenshot of it on my machine, with OpenOffice.org.

Vera.

It's a nice font set to start from. I hope that the community can use it to create a unicode version.

Re:Screenshot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops. I don't think Charter belongs in there. ;)

Re:Screenshot.

[bogie]

"The page you are trying to reach is inaccessible because the
user has exceeded their allotted daily quota."

Wow some host you got there. So which quota do you have? The 10MB daily one? ;)

Re:Screenshot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? There's a 50 MB cap.

Re:Screenshot.

[13Echo]

50 MB. But it goes fast with a Slashdotting. Actually, I wasn't too worried because generally, a single image can handle the Slashdotting and ity staysunder 50 MB. That wasn't the case today, apparently.

Re:Screenshot.

[Anonymous Coward]

If he donates, then what's the problem? Can you say the same?

Re:Screenshot.

[pi_rules]

I've always wanted to see this happen to a webserver of mine, so bring it on. 768k DSL up/down on a AMD K6-2 400mhz w/ 128MB of RAM on IDE drives. Lets watch her die...

Screenshots with the new font setup

There's a Slashdot homepage shot, a Google results shot, and one of my Gnome Control Center.

Re:Screenshot.

[orev]

Don't use jpgs for screenshots. It makes them look horrible. A gif or png is designed for this type of graphic.

Re:Screenshot.

[Art Tatum]

I don't know about you, but I find it interesting that a *comment* buried in a Slashdot story can get blitzed. We're playing with power here folks. :-)

Re:Screenshot.

[Overly Critical Guy]

That screenshot is a nice example of just how poor font rendering typically is on a Linux desktop. Look at the poorly rendered a, s, and w characters.

Really, any character with circular or diagonal lines. I hate looking at assed up versions of Windows fonts, sorry.

Re:Screenshot.

[patrikr]

Yep, JPEGs of screenshots look like ass, and the file size is bigger too. :)

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[unixbob]

What you say is interesting, but the fact that you post anonymously makes the reader think you have an anonymous agenda. If you give your name we can read whether you have a particular axe to grind with the GNOME project, or whether you have an objective argument. But you're still off-topic anyway

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only linus would add support for ttf fonts on the linux console instead of the crappy selection of console fonts we have right now.

Re:Nice

[ajuin]

If I had any moderator points, I'd mod you +1 Funny. Unless you're serious, in which case I should mod you down and add 'Clueless' as an adjective :)

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha this was modded as Interesting?? Slashdot's audience has really really gone to crap. Holy christ.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linux console can already support softfonts, so what's the problem with truetype? Maybe you should be modded down as a moron and an ass.

Re:Nice

[Alan Cox]

I'm sure you meant it as a troll but nothing stops you writing TTF render engines for the console frame buffer. Many language users already do use bitmap consoles and tools like bterm to see 'console' displays.

Re:Nice

[ajuin]

There's a significant difference between truetype fonts and softfonts. Keep in mind that the standard console will only ever support fixed-size, monospace fonts. VGA cards are limited to 256 or, perhaps 512 characters. Given those constraints, it is still possible to write a piece of software that will render truetype fonts on an ordinary vga console, but such a piece would be pretty pointless. The advantages of truetype fonts are flexible sizes, variable spacing and (now) anti-aliasing. Any truetype font rendered to a 8x16 black-and-white matrix is going to look crap. Now, it certainly is possible to write a truetype renderer for the framebuffer console. But why? The whole advantage of the console framebuffer is lack of bloat. If you want to sacrifice speed in exchange for pretty letters, you'd use X. Unless you want to embed a truetype renderer in the kernel, that is. I shudder at the very thought.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you just rip the TT font once from userspace and cache the bitmaps. Andale Mono would be fine at that res. See Alan Cox's comment -- you have to do something like this for Unicode support anyway.

A Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

here

Postscript?

[truenoir]

Any chance for Postscript versions of the font too in case someone wants to use it for serious printing?

Re:Postscript?

[evilviper]

Get to work! :-)

Re:Postscript?

[yerricde]

Modern PostScript printer drivers can convert from TrueType to a representation that PostScript printers can use.

Re:Postscript?

[truenoir]

True, but Postscript is the professional standard for printing (at least in the minds of many designers). There are many people that won't take this font seriously unless it's Postscript (since there are so many low quality TT fonts available already, many designers simply ignore the format for print). For technical limitations, there aren't as many...though I've been told that there are issues printing TT fonts more than PS. Admittedly, this isn't as big a thing now as it was a few years ago, however, if this font is intended to be a new standard font, it should be available in PS as well. If it's just supposed to be a web/onscreen font, well, leave it TT only. Bitstream has put out quality PS fonts in the past, so I simply thought they might post it in that format too. Free TT fonts abound...free quality PS fonts are rare.

Re:Postscript?

[be-fan]

Ha ha! See, someone needs Postscript versions for "serious printing"! This is a reply to that loser who said that Postscript fonts were dead, and TrueType had "won."

Initial thoughts on Vera

[Jon Abbott]

Vera sans seems very similar to Verdana, while Vera serif seems very similar to Century. I never previously considered Verdana and Century to be similar (disregarding serifs of course), but Vera draws this strange similarity together quite easily.

OK, I admit it, I'm a font geek... I can readily identify what fonts that restaurants use on their menus, and so on. If I ever became a superhero, that would probably be one of my superpowers. :^)

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[Gropo]

Nothing to be ashamed of, it's a fun hobby.

On a side note, have you noticed the mass proliferation of Gill Sans over the last 6-12 months? While it's always been a popular font, I have a feeling that its inclusion with both OS X and XP has caused its frequency of usage to skyrocket...

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[shdragon]

OMG! your sig rules! I love logan's run! I bought the dvd and I'm sampling the behind the scenes. My friend & I are going to redo the soundtrack and make it a drum&bass soundtrack.

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[Jon Abbott]

Yeah, Gill Sans seems to be enjoying the same limelight that Officina Sans did a few years back (this is the font that Iomega used for a long time). I have also noticed a slightly increased use of sans fonts with curly lower-case "L" letters -- I really like these though, so I have no complaints. My favorite in this category is the DIN Schriften set, which is used for roadsigns and license plates in Germany.

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[niko9]

I can see you now, sitting next to Captain Furious in the sequel to Mystery Men...Ben Stiller yelling his ars off while you comment on the preety font the arch villain has on his cape. LOL

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[Jon Abbott]

Awesome! Please send me some MP3s of it when you're done -- I'd be interested in hearing the results. You are the first person to comment on my sig, btw.

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[Jon Abbott]

I can see you now, sitting next to Captain Furious in the sequel to Mystery Men...Ben Stiller yelling his ars off while you comment on the preety font the arch villain has on his cape. LOL

Hmm, looks like Combi Symbols CD... It must be RIAA-man!

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[Gropo]

I have also noticed a slightly increased use of sans fonts with curly lower-case "L" letters

Trebuchet MS fur alles! :P

...which is used for roadsigns and license plates in Germany.

"Man, this "Ausfahrt" is one really big town!" ;D

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[Jon Abbott]

"Man, this "Ausfahrt" is one really big town!"

I think that was mentioned on Rick Steve's Travels in Europe show... IIRC, he politely informed viewers that Ausfahrt isn't a town. :^)

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[marmoset]

Here's a great resource for fontspotting. Type geeks go nuts!

Re:Initial thoughts on Vera

[Jon Abbott]

I'm in font heaven! Thanks for the link. :^)

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[noda132]

So shut up and use KDE? Why are you trying to convince other people not to use their preferred desktop environment?

Vera!

[swordboy]

Vera!

What has become of you?

Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?

Re:Vera!

[Anonymous Coward]

does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?

anybody, *else*, that is?

Re:Vera!

[nathanh]

I only remember that she said something about meeting again some sunny day.

Re:Vera!

[SeanAhern]

Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?

Peter Frampton does.

Re:Vera!

[dagnabit]

Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?

Emacs + PostScript

[Yellow Brick Choad]

Write your own PostScript in Emacs.

No, it doesn't get any better than that in the Open Source world.

work with windows and macintosh....

[Anonymous Coward]

but not with XFree86.

Windows: Drop into the winnt\system32\fonts folder (I wouldn't be surprised if right-clicking a font gave you the option of doing that).

Macintosh: Drop into the System:Fonts folder. Newer Finders might magic-route it if you drop it onto the system folder

BeOS: Copy to the home/settings/fonts/ folder, start up the fonts preferences, and click rescan button

XFree86.... search for half an hour to find where fonts are stored. Copy it there. Restart X. wonder why it doesn't show. search man pages for half an hour. Search HOWTOS for an hour. Realize your copy of XFree86 doesn't support tretype fonts. Reboot into windows.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Or.

Upgrade to XFree86 4.3.
mv *.ttf ~/.fonts

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[Anonymous Coward]

XFree86:
1) copy into ~/.fonts/
2) done

Or just follow the instructions provided. Put local.conf in /etc/fonts, and drop the fonts into /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype for a system wide installation. done.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[ACK!!]

XFree86 --

Download fonts.

Drop them onto desktop.

Use KDE's font installer to add them to your list of fonts.

Alternately for the Redhat8 or 9 set simply copy them into their .fonts dir.

Silly people.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[13Echo]

On most Gnome machines, you can just copy them to /usr/share/fonts.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[frezeal]

Anyone install and use these fonts in TextEdit.app for the Mac? I've done this and noticed a problem with the Bitstream Vera Sans Roman. It doesn't show any characters...or I should say, it only shows one. All characters are boxes, at every point size. Anyone else have this problem, or found a workaround.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[SCHecklerX]

On mandrake:

Untar, run 'drakfont', click on the directory containing the unarchived fonts. Click install.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrade your RedHat 1.0 box to something newer.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[ebassi]

I know, I know it's a troll, but I'll bite...

XFree86: explode the tarball and copy the fonts inside $HOME/.fonts

If this doesn't work, you're using a 4 years old version of XFree86 or you're a subhuman with 30 as IQ.

BTW: the omnly thing I had to restart in order to refresh the fonts list, was epiphany. GNOME detected the new Bitstream Vera almost as soon as I drop the ttf inside the fonts folder.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[IamTheRealMike]

Actually, on properly setup gnome 2.2 boxes with fontilus (like redhat 9) just open fonts:// in Nautilus and drop them in. Nothing to it (but you have to know about fonts:// which will be fixed soon).

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it works fine for me.

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, I know it's a troll, but I'll bite...

There's another meaning of "troll" for the archives. Troll: an uncomfortable truth.

Here's the list so far:

an insincere comment intended to provoke responses
an unpopular opinion
a comment with which one disagrees but is unable to explain why
the widely denied obvious

and, our newest member:

an uncomfortable truth

Re:work with windows and macintosh....

[doomy]

GNOME:

Unzip the fonts into ~/.fonts , run fc-cache.

It should be listed now.

Danke.

A Review.

[Frank Grimes]

I just installed these fonts with

tar -xjvf ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10.tar.bz2
cp ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10/*.ttf ~/.fonts/

They are good looking fonts that render well under X11 with xft. On the other hand, I don't like them that much; as a matter of personal preference, I find them too short and fat.

Re:A Review.

[Anonymous Coward]

too short and fat, huh.... I guess that's bad for fonts, but good for your mom?

where do they go?

[ejaw5]

Where are these new fonts suppposed to be copied to on Linux? /usr/share/fonts ? and does it need to be in a subdirectory? I know i'm supposed to know this, but it'd be nice if they explained on the site anyway.

Re:where do they go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Create a .fonts directory in you home directory. Copy them there. Done.

Re:where do they go?

[damiam]

If you're using a recent distro with fontconfig (RedHat 8+ and Debian come to mind, though there are others), you can put them in ~/.fonts/ and they shoudl appear. Otherwise, you'll have to find out where X stores its fonts (check /etc/X11/XF86Config-4) and go through all sorts of voodoo to copy the fonts to those directories and make sure X knows about them.

Re:where do they go?

[Loosewire]

what about other users on the system?

Re:where do they go?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are skrewed. Who cares! If you support multiuser box, you should know how to install system font. Now you are just pretending...

Re:where do they go?

[Slougi]

Put them in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype, then run fc-cache. All as root. You might need to run mkfontdir on the directory too, like this: "mkfontdir /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype"

Re:where do they go?

[Slougi]

Alternatively you can also put them in /usr/share/fonts//, forgot to mention that!

Re:where do they go?

[mz001b]

Where are these new fonts suppposed to be copied to on Linux? /usr/share/fonts ? and does it need to be in a subdirectory? I know i'm supposed to know this, but it'd be nice if they explained on the site anyway.

To install them system wide, put them in a subdirectory of /usr/share/fonts (like /usr/share/fonts/vera/), and then, in /usr/share/fonts/, run fc-cache, which will update the font cache file, and the fonts should be visible everywhere.

Re:where do they go?

[Loosewire]

i run a multi user box yes. But only a few users, - me , my brother, and a few others. but i dont want to add fonts individually for each user.

ps thanks to the other replyer who gave instructions :-)

Re:where do they go?

[Anonymous Coward]

run ttmkfdir first =)

# cd /path/to/ttf-bitstream-vera
# ttmkfdir > fonts.scale
# mkfontdir

Without the fonts.scale file being created first the mkfontdir binary will output a font.dir file with nothing but a 0.
Afterward, list this directory in your xfs conf or as a font dir directly in your XF86Config file.

Nice selection..

[ThreeZee]

I'm not complaining.. so many fonts are offered for free out there.. add a couple more to the list and put a smile on your face. =) *Make your AMD run cooler! Remove what you don't need! Ph33r my f4n!

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[grendelkhan]

Why are you posting this rant, yet again? If you are that unhappy with the current direction of Gnome, fork it or don't use it.

Beautiful font

[Ender Ryan]

This font is probably the most beautiful font I have ever seen, especially the serif font. It is by far the most easily readable serif font ever. I normally despise serif fonts because I find them pretty unreadable, but Bitstream Vera Serif rocks.

It's really good to finally have a high-quality free font set.

FWIW. YMMV.

Re:Beautiful font

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. It's like you looked at that painting of dogs playing poker, or at a velvet Elvis, and said, "This painting is probably the most beautiful painting I have ever seen."

If you did that, it would be obvious that you need to get out and look at a few more paintings.

Ender Ryan: You need to get out and look at a few more fonts. Might I suggest: ITC Veljovic, Adobe Caslon, Adobe Garamond, ITC Franklin Gothic, Goudy, Frutiger, Helvetica Neue.

Re:Beautiful font

[1u3hr]

It's really good to finally have a high-quality free font set.

Except it's not really a "set", as there are no serif italics.

Finally, a decent monospaced font!

[zsazsa]

I just installed these on my Windows machine. The monospace font is excellent. Until now I haven't seen a decent TTF monospace font that was properly hinted to keep it from looking horrible at 9pt, but still nice and smooth at large sizes.

The Lucida Sans monospace font that came with Windows pales in comparison to Vera Sans Mono, even though the Lucida family was supposedly designed with bitmap screens in mind.

Re:Finally, a decent monospaced font!

[Jugalator]

Agreed -- this one is *finally* looking rather good. I've previously used Courier New and Andale Mono. I found Andale Mono to look slightly better, but I use ClearType with Windows and the anti-alias seem to reduce the readability of Andale a bit more than Vera already at 10 pt. I'd assume even worse at 9 pt.

Re:Finally, a decent monospaced font!

[oever]

I'm using Luxi Mono size 8 in SuSE 8.2 and size set to small in konsole, and I'm very happy with it.
I'm working on a 800x600 screen and this small fonts allows me to work with two terminals alongside.

Here's a screenshot.

Re:Finally, a decent monospaced font!

[YellowBook]

The monospace font is excellent. Until now I haven't seen a decent TTF monospace font that was properly hinted to keep it from looking horrible at 9pt, but still nice and smooth at large sizes.

Andale Mono (the font formerly known as Monotype.com) is quite good. However, at least in the gratis version, it isn't a complete font family; it doesn't have bold and italic. Because of this, it's not perfectly suited for things like terminals or text editors.

Bitstream Vera Sans is great for these purposes. The betas had some problems (it had a kind of awkward, semi-serifed appearance, and it was hard to distinguish O from 0 and l from 1), but these have been fixed for the release.

Re:Finally, a decent monospaced font!

[swb]

What's wrong with Lucida Console? I think its a great face and highly visible at tiny point sizes.

I've tried vera and the intercharacter gap is too huge, and the lowercase L is kind of annoying looking.

Re:Finally, a decent monospaced font!

[iabervon]

What I really like is having monospaced fonts with the same family as proportional fonts. It used to be the case that a document would be all proportional or all monospaced, but these days you see a lot of text with code embedded in it, and it always looks wrong with unrelated fonts for the two pieces.

Re:Finally, a decent monospaced font!

[moonbender]

Just tried Vera Mono, but I'm back to Lucida Console. I don't know how anyone could stand it as an editor font, I think it's pretty horrible at 8 pt. It might be Windows XP's font rendering, but Lucida just appears so much clearer.

Re:Finally, a decent monospaced font!

[cpeterso]

The Vera Sans Mono font is just too fuzzy and heavy. I'll stick with Courier New for my coding, thank you.

MODERATE PARENT DOWN!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS guy is a TROLL

incase it WASN'T OBVIOUS!!!!

MODERATE him/her/it DOWN!!!

Re:MODERATE PARENT DOWN!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS guy is a BUTTFUCKER

incase it WASN'T OBVIOUS!!!!

MODERATE him/her/it DOWN!!!

Re:MODERATE PARENT DOWN!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS guy is a COCKSUCKER

incase it WASN'T OBVIOUS!!!!

MODERATE him/her/it DOWN!!!

Mandrake Rocks

[Christianfreak]

If you have Mandrake, untar the directory somewhere

click 'Mandrake Control Center'
System-> Fonts-> Advanced

Click add, select the directory, close the Add window. Click install list. Voila! New fonts no messing with X configs or even restarting it.

Re:Mandrake Rocks

[evilviper]

Ummm, yeah... That's so much easier than: cp *.ttf /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/

Re:Mandrake Rocks

[dpete4552]

As evilviper said, all you gotta do is copy it to your TrueType fonts directory and it works just fine. No messing with X configs or even restarting it.

Re:Mandrake Rocks

[Zigg]

So do you use your system as root all the time, or is your X installation world-writable?

Re:Mandrake Rocks

[evilviper]

Yes, I ommited the SU... Would you like me to include the possword I typed as well? How about I make a symbol to indicate where I hit TAB rather than typed everything out? Would that be more to your liking?

Having the fonts directory world writable would be no worse than a mandrake util that doesn't require you to have the root password... (The original poster didn't mention anything about entering the root password either.)

Sorry for being dumb

[Loosewire]

But why are fonts so valuable?
I keep seeing fonts which are expensive to buy.
Buy fonts???? but their just pictures of letters...
Again - sorry for being dumb

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Because someone has to actually draw each character from A-Z, a-z, numbers, funky characters, set the correct kerning for each character, and it all has to look just right at different sizes.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Jugalator]

But why are fonts so valuable?
I keep seeing fonts which are expensive to buy.
Buy fonts???? but their just pictures of letters...

I think it's because fonts often tend to become associated with a trademark. The font developers probably know this and set the licensing costs accordingly.

For example... The Lucida Grande font has become associated with the Aqua interface and is further tied into the new Apple "style" since it's used all over www.apple.com.

Another example... The Exocet font went well-known to all Blizzard fans since it was used in Diablo I and of course also used in Diablo II since it had become closely connected to the Diablo games by then.

I don't think fonts are often expensive just because it took a long time to create all the letters. It's probably more to it than that.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

But why are fonts so valuable?
I keep seeing fonts which are expensive to buy.
Buy fonts???? but their just pictures of letters...
Again - sorry for being dumb

Because designing legible and aesthetically pleasing typefaces is requires a lot of skilled labour, doubly so for fonts that should look good on low resolution devices like computer screens. Designing a complete high quality can take YEARS.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

But why are fonts so valuable?

Because they are rare. Because hardly no one goes is willing to spend the time needed to create them, and then give it away. The fact that there's a Slashdot story about the release of a font, shows how valuable they must be.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[The Bungi]

For the same reason software is so valuable, even though it's just a jumble of bytes.

Yet it's interesting that the "everything wants to be free" crowd couldn't shell out $5 for a complete operating system but doesn't think twice about accepting that a font can have a monetary value attached to it.

Uncanny.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess because fonts have a much more artistic quality to them than operating systems, at least as things stand now. You can write non-artistic code and get away with it - fonts don't have that luxury. (Although artistic/well designed code does stand above the herd)

True artists are rare, be it fonts or code. But in fonts, only true artists can play the game and get away with it.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[GauteL]

Oh.. I'm sorry, but fonts are a HUGE amount of work. Much more than you or the original poster realize. TTF-fonts is much more than just creating a few bitmaps, since they have to scale.

They have to be hinted to make sure they scale perfectly (which is incredibly hard).

Creating funky and flashy fonts are mostly much easier than creating very readable fonts. Microsoft paid one of the best font designers to create Verdana and Georgia (actually he was regarded as THE best), and if I remember correctly it took him at least a year.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Jon Abbott]

For example... The Lucida Grande font has become associated with the Aqua interface and is further tied into the new Apple "style" since it's used all over www.apple.com.

Although Apple has Lucida Grande listed in their CSS fontsheets, they use Myriad Pro for titles on their website. They are also now using Myriad Pro on their hardware (look on the LCD panel for the iMac). They used to use Garamond Condensed for most everything, and occasionally you still see it (such as on the AppleCare Support pages).

Hi, I'm Jon Abbott, and I am an avowed font geek.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Crispy Critters]

I don't think fonts are often expensive just because it took a long time to create all the letters. It's probably more to it than that.

Good fonts are difficult to make. Making something for a title is easy, but it is a lot of difficult work to create a font in which large blocks of text are easy to read and which does this at many different sizes.

I have Microsoft's verdana font on my linux boxes, because it is an exceptionally good, easy-to-read font. I hope these new fonts are as good, so all I will need are Vera fonts and everything from Divide by Zero.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Although Apple has Lucida Grande listed in their CSS fontsheets...

The graphic titles are Myriad, yes, but assuming you have Lucida Grande installed, (ie, are using a Mac), it'll be all over the site, just as it is the main font of the Aqua interface (and will continue to be, because it's identifiable.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Watts Martin]

Because designing a good font--particularly a good body font--is a lot harder than people seem to think it is. And despite what the other reply to you said, it has very little to do with brand names.

First and foremost, you're designing something that has to be independent of output devices. It has to look perfect on a laser printer and a high-end typesetter, and look at least readable on a screen. These aren't just "pictures of letters," they're mathematical descriptions of letters.

Second, if you're doing a full font set--one fo the ones that costs you $200, not $25--you're not just designing an alphabet. You're doing upper case, lower case, numbers, punctuation and symbols. Everything on the keyboard. But wait, not just everything on the keyboard. Now do all the letters that have accents, both upper and lower case. Do all the typography symbols--em dashes, en dashes, open and close quotes, fractions, bullets, daggers, European punctuation symbols. All of those are crafted to be matched with a good body font, remember. Oh, yes, don't forget all the ligatures like "ae," "fi", "fl", "ff" (and "ffi" and "ffl," if you're pedantic--and these are just the standard ligatures). Repeat for any symbol combination that's different between upper and lower case, too.

Now do that all again three times. Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic are, in a good body font, entirely different. Just thickening the lines and tilting the letters doesn't cut it. (This is particularly true for italic.) And, if you're doing this for professonal print use, you'll want to do a true small cap set--they're not just capitals reduced in size, they're subtly reproportioned capitals--and a set of oldstyle numerals. And maybe a few alternate caps, if you're doing a font that could also be used for headline copy. (For the sake of simplicity, we'll assume you're not doing opticals--new versions of the entire set of all those letters, reproportioned to look better at different font sizes. But really professional fonts--including TeX's native Computer Modern--actually do this.)

Now, keep in mind that when these letters are put together they have to flow correctly. You need to make sure all the letters are spaced just so. Put all the proper metrics into the font so programs that are aware of it (like good desktop publishing programs, or TeX) know how to do this.

And last but not least, the font has to fulfill its basic function of being easily readable. Even digital fonts are following in the footsteps of an art going back hundreds of years. The strokes and the weights of good typefaces are very carefully designed, down to the subtle differences in periods and the dots on the "i". (Seriously. Take a close look sometime.) It may take a font designer, or at least an experienced typesetter, to be really consciously aware of the differences, but people who aren't trained will still notice a bad font. Something won't be quite right. They'll say it's ugly, it's hard to read. They just won't want to use it.

If you're only looking for on-screen fonts, sure, the bar is lower. If you're only looking for decorative fonts, the bar is also lower. But there's a reason beyond mere "brand power" that Adobe Chaparral Pro is $200.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Loosewire]

Oh.. I'm sorry, but fonts are a HUGE amount of work. Much more than you or the original poster realize.
Please dont get angry, i asked in the first place beacuse i didnt know. Now i have furthered my knowledge and i thank ALL repliers

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[1u3hr]

But why are fonts so valuable? I keep seeing fonts which are expensive to buy. Buy fonts???? but their just pictures of letters...

An audio CD is basically just a WAV file. In both cases, a lot of work goes into creating the artwork, though the cost of reproduction is negligible.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft paid one of the best font designers to create Verdana and Georgia (actually he was regarded as THE best), and if I remember correctly it took him at least a year.


And he ended up with Georgia? I don't believe it. How could anyone who knows anything about fonts have had anything to do with Georgia? (the butt-ugliest font in the known universe)

I figued they had 1000 monkeys playing with font software for 1000 years and Georgia was the closest they came to a real font.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Sidenote; For us Windows users who like Lucida Grande, I've found that Lucida Sans Unicode (ships with Windows) is almost identical.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Jugalator]

Sorry, I didn't mean it to come out as fonts being a piece of cake to create. Just saying that not *only* are they expensive for the time required to create all the letters, but I think for other reasons as well. Of course I understand they might need to scale perfectly from huge sizes down to 8 points. Of course I understand that readable fonts millions of people need to feel comfortable with are harder to create than barely readable (i.e. "flashy") fonts. Anything else would clearly be illogical.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[fishermonger]

including TeX's native Computer Modern

Is it me, or CM really suck? It look cheasy, and also Springer Varlag. Why can't they just use times (like Cambridge eg)?

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

I take it from the provided links that Adobe expects users to pay $200+ to use those fonts? (complete sets anyhow, get each variation for only $35 each).

I don't get it. they expect to make money that way? as an end user I'll just say "fuck it, I'll use my default fonts who cares what those look like".

I could be wrong, but I follow the links you provide, and I see absurd price schedules.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Jon Abbott]

If you think that's bad, you should see how much Adobe is charging for their Font Folio package -- they want $9,000 for it! It really demonstrates the relativity of value in today's society.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Jon Abbott]

If you think that's bad, you should see how much Adobe is charging for their Font Folio package -- they want $9,000 for it! It really demonstrates the relativity of value in today's society.

Re:Sorry for being dumb

[Jon Abbott]

If you think that's bad, you should see how much Adobe is charging for their Font Folio package -- they want $9,000 for it! It really demonstrates the relativity of value in today's society.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font looks great!!

[Futurepower(R)]

Tried Vera on a Win XP machine. The Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (the full name of the font) font looks great!! Thanks to everyone who made it available. Lucida Console is an excellent monospaced font, but it does not have enough space between lines. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono has sensible spacing.

It is very, very difficult to make a good font. Those who are knowledgeable about computers tend to be very insensitive to graphical clarity, I've found, although that is changing, it seems.

Bitstream Vera Serif is useless to me because it has a terrible bold. This is a typical failing of fonts. Bitstream Vera Serif Bold is really a very different-looking font, not a bold of Vera Serif. Vera Serif, not bold, looks great, however.

To be truly useful, fonts meant for general use need a demi-bold. Sometimes you want a full bold, and sometimes a full bold is too heavy.

Re:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font looks great!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you were strongly against Windows XP?

Re:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font looks great!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only things he is strongly against are his boyfriend's buttocks.

Re:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font looks great!!

[TKinias]

scripsit Futurepower(R):

To be truly useful, fonts meant for general use need a demi-bold. Sometimes you want a full bold, and sometimes a full bold is too heavy.

To be truly useful, fonts meant for general use need italics! WTF are they thinking? I have absolutely no use for a general-purpose font with no italics...

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[Anonymous Coward]

The original poster may be off-topic but that doesn't mean he's wrong. Gnome is my prefered enviroment, Gnome2 I consider to be a complete waste of hard drive space and a major step backwards. Computing made simple shouldn't imply the user is simple. And people who chose gnome over kde have every right at feeling frustrated when the feedback they give to the 'community' is ignored.

Redhat 9

[kajoob]

I just installed RH9 and the fonts are friggen amazing. Even in Mozilla. I've had XFT running on previous versions of RH and 'borrowed' the TTF's from windows but they still don't look this good. Does anybody know what RH did to make the fonts look this good?

Re:Redhat 9

[CommandNotFound]

Pixie dust. Or, more accurately, the xft2 library which renders the fonts. RH8.0 used it, but the Mozilla RH8 shipped with was not compiled against the library unless you compiled it yourself or downloaded the _rh8_xft mozilla rpms. I had no idea how much the font renderer mattered before RH8... pretty much any font looks good onscreen with xft + AA.

Yes, it is quite impressive, especially considering that without anti-aliasing the Luxi fonts don't look that impressive. This is the first system besides a Mac that I've been able to use anti-aliased fonts and not get a headache or annoyed. I much prefer the RH fonts to my XP box at work, which I set to disable AA below about 14 points because the clarity suffers IMO.

Re:Redhat 9

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you set it to disable AA below a certain size if you don't mind explaining? The fontconfig people say that below 8 its a must, and they are saying your need a new version of fontconfig first. Do you have some other workaround?

Re:Redhat 9

[KeyserDK]

It is not Xft that renders fonts. It's the freetype lib. Xft is a client side API that uses fontconfig to select fonts. If you update your freetype lib to 2.1.4 you will probably see a few more enhancements.

Instead you should really appreciate the amazing work that has been done by the freetype project. Especially David Turner has been cranking out algorithms to make your linux desktop look nice with AA fonts, even without the patented hinter.

Re:Redhat 9

[remou]

thank you! thank you! thank you!

just went out and upgraded to xft2 mozilla builds
and a new galeon my RH80!

I had nooo idea the world wide web was sooo pretty!

remosito

Re:Redhat 9

[CommandNotFound]

It is not Xft that renders fonts. It's the freetype lib. Xft is a client side API that uses fontconfig to select fonts. If you update your freetype lib to 2.1.4 you will probably see a few more enhancements.

Now I'm really confused. The docs I read seem to say the exact opposite of your statement. From the Freetype home page:

Note that FreeType 2 is a font service and doesn't provide APIs to perform higher-level features, like text layout or graphics processing (e.g. colored text rendering, "hollowing", etc..). However, it greatly simplifies these tasks by providing a simple, easy to use and uniform interface to access the content of font files.

And the FreeType Related Projects Page says this about XFT:

XFT is the name of the client-side library developed by Keith Packard to handle the new X11 extension named XRender. More information can be found on this page or that one. XFT is the library used by the Qt toolkit and upcoming GTK 2.0 to display anti-aliased fonts. [emphasis added]

Instead you should really appreciate the amazing work that has been done by the freetype project. Especially David Turner has been cranking out algorithms to make your linux desktop look nice with AA fonts, even without the patented hinter.

I'll give credit and free beer to those involved, and gladly. Can anybody clear this up, though?

Re:Redhat 9

[KeyserDK]

I might have been a bit quick. Figuring out what part does what. It is indeed a bit hard, but i think i've figured it out ;). The problem is that Xft1 is quite a bit different from Xft2 in functionality. That is why there is so many different views on what Xft actually does. I believe the explanation on the freetype page refers to Xft1. (it's out of date)

Anyway i believe the layer is like this in gnome2 (as an example), starting from the top:

gtk2->pango->fontconfig->Xft2->freetype2. Pango does the text layout part. Not very interesting wrt. AA fonts, since it can use different backends for the rendering part. From the fontconfig developers reference:

2. FUNCTIONAL OVERVIEW Fontconfig contains two essential modules, the configuration module which builds an internal configuration from XML files and the matching module which accepts font patterns and returns the nearest matching

Xft2 description from fontconfig.org

The current version of Xft (2.0) provides a client-side font API for X applications. It uses Fontconfig to select fonts and the X protocol for rendering them. When available, Xft uses the Render extension to accelerate text drawing. When Render is not available, Xft uses the core protocol to draw client-side glyphs. This provides completely compatible support of client-side fonts for all X servers.

And last but not least the freetype description:

FreeType is a free, high-quality portable font engine used by Xft to rasterize fonts. While Fontconfig doesn't expose any FreeType dependencies on applications, it does use FreeType internally to get font information from font files.

That means freetype gets the information Xft needs to render hinted and anti aliased fonts.

So i was a bit quick to state that freetype did the rendering part =).

Re:Redhat 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting freetype and xft2 from Debian unstable even makes Debian look good on a desktop. One day I upgraded to the official Debian KDE3, and all of the sudden the fonts were pretty. So, not just Red Hat has been affected.

Re:Redhat 9

[be-fan]

The other explanation that was posted was a bit inaccurate. I've used FreeType to render in one of my own projects, so I think I can explain things a little better

Fontconfig -- X-independent library that handles font management. This includes finding font files on the hard drive, mapping them to Xft font names, and matching non-existant font requests to similar available fonts.
Xft2 -- Xft2 is the actual client API. It's primary job is to handle rendering requests. It auto-detects if XRender is available and uses that to render, or else it falls back to the core X protocol. Xft2 also abstracts many of FreeType's services, such as access to font metrics information.
FreeType -- This handles the actual rasterization. TrueType/Postscript fonts are stored as vector graphics inside font files. FreeType itself doesn't do any font management (you can't give it a font name for example) or anything like that. The FreeType API consists of functions to open a given font file, and functions to rasterize a given letter (glyph) to a user-provided memory buffer. It also has an API to cache glyphs, so if you rasterize the same letters at the same sizes over and over, you can just use the bitmaps without rasterizing them a gain.

So the basic thing is that FontConfig actually finds the font files for a given name ("Times New Roman -- 12 pt -- Bold,") Xft2 gets the request to render a string of text with that font, it uses FreeType2 to render each individual character to a buffer, and then uses XRender and it's own algorithms align those bitmaps properly and draw strings of them onto the window.

Re:Redhat 9

[Overly Critical Guy]

Sorry, I use both Red Hat Linux 9 and Windows XP, and Windows' font rendering still beats it by light years. I actually get headaches staring at Red Hat Linux 9 for extended periods, and I've adjusted settings endlessly attempting to make things as smooth and clearly rendered as Windows.

There are clear artifacts in the Linux font rendering. Yes, I've tried enabling the TrueType interpreter. There is clearly work to go on this.

Thank you Bitstream!

[PRR]

Thank you Bitstream!

Let's hope all the major distros eventually adopt these true-type fonts as the defacto defaults. I had no problems doing the ttmkfont trick myself, but I'm sure it was a bit confusing for many newbies. This will make Linux/Gnome/KDE/etc much more easier for the non-tech crowd to adopt!

well, I was going to install them

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to install them, but then I read this:

Make sure you are not using the freetype version included in XFree86 4.3, as it has bugs that significantly degrade most fonts, including Vera.

What a way to inspire confidence. I just installed Mandrake 9.1, which uses XFree 4.3. You think they'd check these things.

Relative Font Sizes

[Skidge]

I tried using these fonts in Mozilla, but my problem with them is that the serif font is much larger than Times New Roman on my Windows machine (actually, my problem is that Times New Roman seems to be smaller than most other fonts). Many web designers seem to do their work, font-size-wise, with the default size of Times New Roman as their basis. So when using other fonts (Verdana, for example since it's very popular on the web), they size it down a bit so its comparable to TNR. Before CSS became widespread, TNR would default size="3", and Verdana would usually be set by a designer at size="2", or now with CSS some set Verdana at size=80%. So, when changing out your Serif font to one that's larger, like this new Bitstream one, the pages using the browsers default font seem huge. I moved the default font size down a bit, but then on other pages with relative font sizes everything was tiny.

Since I can't change the web designing habits of people everywhere, I changed it back to Times New Roman.

Re:Relative Font Sizes

[pi_rules]

If you're using a Mozilla browser you really should just use their text zooming feature. Unlike IE it actually works when you tell it to largen up the page. I'm in galeon now, which has a quick little up/down arrow clicky thing on it that lets me do it, Phoenix/Firebird/??? has ctrl++ and ctrl+-, but I entirely forget what stock Mozilla uses.

It's handy, as my eyesight isn't the best and spending 12 hours a day in front of a monitor will -really- stress them out. A quick mutter of "damn designers" when I hit a page that's forcing small font sizes, a couple of keystrokes, and I can read the darned thing. Sometimes the formatting gets a little goofed up, but that doesn't really bother me.

I'm geeked -- my screen has NEVER been this readable before. I might surf the web all day just to drool at how purdy my screen is now.

Thanks guys.

Re:Relative Font Sizes

[smcv]

It's handy, as my eyesight isn't the best and spending 12 hours a day in front of a monitor will -really- stress them out. A quick mutter of "damn designers" when I hit a page that's forcing small font sizes...

I can just imagine some future speech recognition system where saying "damn designers" to a web browser will switch off animation and enable sensible fonts :-)

Re:Relative Font Sizes

[Chris Tucker]

So pi_rules sez:

"Unlike IE it actually works when you tell it to largen up the page"

"largen"? What the hell kind of word is that? Use proper English, dammit!

The CORRECT word is, "embiggen"!

A perfectly cromulent word!

Re:Relative Font Sizes

[Anonymous Coward]

Times New Roman was actually commissioned by the New York Times (go figure) to allow them to condense a larger amount of information onto the page.

In other words, yes-it is smaller-but it's also designed (for paper, anyway-to be extremely legible even at tiny type sizes, unfortunately, the serifs don't help text legibility on a monitor.)

You can find the history of it here.

Re:Relative Font Sizes

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.pointlessart.com/education/loyalist/typ eTalk/timesnewroman/main.html

oops.

Just installed these.

[SCHecklerX]

I'm not incredibly impressed. I think the Adobe-Helvetica family is much easier to read, and it's been a part of XFree for as long as I have used it.

These are too wide. For fixed-width terminal fonts, I like the jmk collection. I haven't looked at the serif vera, so maybe it is better than, say, Times, but I don't tend to use serif on screen anyway.

Re:Just installed these.

[SCHecklerX]

And to follow up to my own post:

This *is* a nice fontset, I didn't mean to slam it. I just prefer what was already available on the linux boxen I use. Now for windows, this will be great, since I have yet to find a decent monospace font on that platform. I will be trying it the next time I have to sit in front of one of those awful things.

Xfree86 instructions for the wizard deprived

[mackstann]

Stick them in whatever directory you want, if that directory isn't already in XF86Config, then add it. Run "xset +fp /new/font/path" then "xset fp rehash".

In that dir, run mkfontdir and then "ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale". Should work.

Re:Has anyone noticed?

[Anonymous Coward]

6x13 4 life, yo.

Ugly

[Anonymous Coward]

They're ugly, and they hurt my eyes. Hey kids, lets anti-alias everything!

Re:Ugly

[Anonymous Coward]

I anti-alias'd your mom last night.

Italics? (was slashdot in Vera Serif)

[1u3hr]

Very disappointing to see that the serif form has only a regular and bold form, no true italics, so your screenshot shows the loathsome synthetic oblique version -- ie, just distorted the roman, no changes in letterform. Most true italic fonts have distinctive forms for "a", "g", "f". So I'll be sticking to Times or Georgia for my screen fonts. I really HATE it when the OS messes with my fonts -- if there's no real italics, don't give me ersatz

Re:Italics? (was slashdot in Vera Serif)

[daw]

Agreed. Why would they release a font without real italics? And treat it as the savior of the linux desktop... Kinda ruins the whole thing.

Re:Italics? (was slashdot in Vera Serif)

[jg]

There are words about gift horses here that
might apply...

In any case, Bitstream had never built
serif italic faces for Prima, Vera's progenitor.
- Jim

Anyway, You All Forgot The Most Important Thing...

[insin]

How does it perform with smilies?

The slight offset of the monospaced closing round bracket gives your smiles a new and cheeky character of their own.

Check out some smilies

THANK YOU.

[dwheeler]

I just want to say "Thank you!" to the MANY people who worked to make this possible. We all owe them a round of applause.

Gill Sans?

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

I can't find Gill Sans on my obsolete Windows XP Professional partition. Are you sure it does not come with MS Office or where did you get it?

Re:Gill Sans?

[Gropo]

I really wouldn't know, I was basing my knowledge on display-boxen at the local Best Buy...

Re:Gill Sans?

[FunkyChild]

Lucida is *kinda* similar - that's what OS X uses as it's default UI font (Lucida Grande).

Re:GNOME Armageddon (posted by someone with balls)

[Anonymous Coward]

The only wrong with this article is that it's offtopic. These are very legitimate concerns. I found the article very interesting and well written.

Computer Modern?

[N1KO]

Whenever the topic of fonts comes up, I always see people complain that linux doesn't have good font support.

The set of fonts that comes with tetex is amazing yet nobody has made a good conversion to use under X (the fonts have a weird encoding that doesn't work well under anything other than tex/latex).

Re:Computer Modern?

[Cyph]

It's not about the availability of fonts, in my opinion. It's about the ease of installation and management of fonts, which is quite painful if you are dealing with hundreds to thousands of fonts at some point.

I've yet to find an easy way to activate or deactivate fontsets on the fly, I've yet to manage to get X to recurse through the subdirectories in font paths, without having to add every subdirectory to XF86Config individually. That's what is bad about font support in Linux.

Something like Font Reserve for X would be quite awesome.

no offense to the creators

[Anonymous Coward]

but these fonts are really boring.

is there something Im missing ?

Re:no offense to the creators

[orthogonal]

but these fonts are really boring.

is there something Im missing ?

Boring fonts make for good reading. I want to notice what I'm reading means, not the letters with which it is displayed.

Non-boring also means distrating, busy, and in-your-face.

That was easy

[Daniel Phillips]

Installing on debian sid turned out to require nothing more than copying the .ttf files to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/, and they were available immediately.

Comparing to MS Verdana - looks the same, but with more styles. Unlike Verdana, the oblique isn't misnamed as italic. The serif version looks decent as a screen font at small sizes.

Good, it's as good or better than Verdana in every department, that's one sorta-free font I can lose.

Re:That was easy

[gid]

Ahh, I was curious as how to do that. I was dreading having to run xmkmf or whatever and tons of other shit to make ttf fonts work in the past. Or do you have to run an xfont server to get this copy to directory capability?

I wonder how long before these fonts will be available via apt?

Re:That was easy

[Daniel Phillips]

Ahh, I was curious as how to do that. I was dreading having to run xmkmf or whatever and tons of other shit to make ttf fonts work in the past. Or do you have to run an xfont server to get this copy to directory capability?

Straight up XFree 4.2.1, no font server.

no latin-2 :(

[szo]

Would it really hurt to include the characters and ? Damn. Still no good font for us :( Szo

Re:no latin-2 :(

[szo]

Damn, I can't even post /. those characters :(

Re:no latin-2 :(

[szo]

Ok, here it goes: û õ

Re:no latin-2 :(

[Jugalator]

Hmm... I can type û and õ in this edit box and it looks fine with Vera Mono? Is it something with the serif typeface?

On the issue of installing fonts in Linux...

[Cereal Box]

Slightly offtopic, but take a look at this (Taken from another thread in this article):

"mv *.ttf ~/.fonts"
"Download fonts. Drop them onto desktop. Use KDE's font installer to add them to your list of fonts."
"On most Gnome machines, you can just copy them to /usr/share/fonts"
"On mandrake: Untar, run 'drakfont', click on the directory containing the unarchived fonts. Click install."

Do you guys realize that this means there are at least *FOUR* different ways to install fonts on Linux (five actually, if you're using an older version of X)? Ever wonder why some clamor for desktop/distribution consistency? At least in Windows and MacOS there's ONE way to do something this simple.

Re:On the issue of installing fonts in Linux...

[fader]

Do you guys realize that this means there are at least *FOUR* different ways to install fonts on Linux

Did you realize that there are at least four ways to get Harry Potter?
1. Buy it from Amazon online.
2. Go to a bookstore and buy it.
3. Rent the movie from a video store.
4. Listen to the audiobook.

Geez, with all those choices, no wonder nobody's ever heard of it. I guess maybe once it's on TV the world will be safe.

Re:On the issue of installing fonts in Linux...

[CommandNotFound]

I really really shouldn't, but I can't resist:

"copy a:\times.ttf c:\windows\fonts"
"Download fonts. Open Control Panel | Fonts. Select File | Install New Font..."
"On some Windows machines, just right-click the font and choose "Install" or Send To | Fonts"
"Open My Computer, and go to c:\Windows\Fonts (c:\winnt on some Windows versions). Copy the fonts to this folder"

Do you realize this means there are at least *FOUR* different ways to install fonts on Windows (Five, actually, if you're using an ancient version with Adobe Type Manager).

...not a personal attack, Cereal, just a little jab to remind you that things aren't so clean and green on the other side of the fence, either. (And check out that file browser in the Install Fonts menu item... that looks like old 16-bit era GUI controls)

Re:On the issue of installing fonts in Linux...

[Cereal Box]

You're confusing the issue.

The point is, on Windows, if someone asks me "how do I install this font?", I can say with utmost confidence "copy it to c:\windows\fonts".

However...

On Linux, the dialog is more like this:

"How do I install this font?"
"Well, if you have Redhat 8 you can do Z. If Redhat 9, do Y but only if you have the latest version of X installed. If not, you can do Z but you also have to type this other command. If you have Mandrake, copy them to (some folder) and run the (font config) command. That only applies if you have the latest Mandrake. If not, you have to do this other thing. You'll also need to edit (some obscure config file) first..."

See where this is going? Wouldn't it be nice if you could install fonts the same way, regardless of your Linux distribution? Why must something so simple become so complicated?

Re:On the issue of installing fonts in Linux...

[Cid Highwind]

Wouldn't it be nice if you could install fonts the same way, regardless of your Linux distribution?

(troll=condescending gentoo user)Yeah, I think everyone should be able to type "emerge ttf-bitstream-vera" and have them installed automagically!(/troll)

Seriously though, fontconfig *is* fixing this. Copying .ttf files into ~/.fonts will be universal once fontconfig 2 and Xfree 4.3 trickle down into all the distros. Expect support in Redhat and Mandrake real soon now (if it's not out already), and in Debian-stable sometime in early 2007. :)

Re:On the issue of installing fonts in Linux...

[SCHecklerX]

Not really. Most of the gui's mentioned (kde font installer, gnome, drakfont) do the same thing in the background. It's nice having the flexibility to do things the way that works for you, no?

More Fonts!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I usualy copy all the fonts from Windows to ... Linux/BSD boxes. Because I've payed for them when bought the copy of Win98 anyway.

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[Sir_Stinksalot]

I agree with a lot of what you say because I prefer to be able to configure things and make my desktop personal. But I think you have it wrong when you think that the average person will want to change their desktop. The next time you think everyone or even a majority of people want to change their configuration just go look at the closest windows users desktop. I guarantee that 9 times out of 10 it will be grey or blue like the defaults in windows. The only thing that really changes is the background.

I think that gnome is nice I like it and I think it looks beautiful right our of the box. But since I like configurability I use KDE. But for a fairly fast and pretty desktop gnome is a good choice. If you dont like it you can feel free to fork it and start your own DE, or switch to another DE.

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you posting this rant, yet again? If you are that unhappy with the current direction of Gnome, fork it or don't use it.

There's a third option to which you appear oblivious. Don't use it and spread the word about how bad it is in order to convince others not to waste their time with it.

This "shut up and be grateful that you're getting it for free" attitude is yet another in the lost list of reasons why the "open source" community is destined to remain a fringe group at best.

Why not UTF-8 encoding and default XFree86 fonts?

[Quietti]

Given that Gnome 2.2 uses UTF-8 by default, I wonder why these ISO-8859-1/9/15 fonts were not merged into a UTF-8 skeleton to which e.g. Cyrillic, Hellenic and missing Latin glyphs could be added? Then, we would really have a good starting point for what could become a GOOD default system font, not just in Gnome but in XFree86 too.

Right now, the default Adobe fonts that ship with XFree86 are pretty crap! Granted the URW fonts released thru the Gimp site could be good as well and maybe should replace the tired old Adobe fonts. In any case, I think that, from now on, XFree86 should ship with only 3 fonts by default: serif, sans, mono - all in UTF-8.

Whether the Type1 URW fonts or these new Bitstream fonts should get that prestigious role remains an open issue, but in any case, the fonts should cover as much of UTF-8 as possible and at least all of the following: Arabic, CJK (simplified forms only), Cyrillic, Latin, Hellenic, Judaic. Once we have that, we have default UTF-8 base fonts equal in strenght to Arial/Times New Roman/Courrier New, which any application can expect to find. This would at least solve the problems experienced by Opera and OpenOffice, for selecting sensible default fonts.

Tried antialiasing Vera - it hurts

[ites]

On my laptop 1400x1050 LCD, antialiasing Vera gives me an almost instant headache. It is quite impressive. The fonts are nice, but I'm forced to use them with anti-aliasing off. (Would this be a double negative?)

And here's the Sans

[sh4de]

The Vera family produces some very nice results with OS X's immaculate font rendering engine:

vera.png

Re:And here's the Sans

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the Slashdot designers don't know how to use whitespace. Any font looks horrid all cramped in like that.

Euro

[klaasb]

Is it me, or did they actually forget to make a Euro symbol?
When I type option-shift-2 on my mac, I get something totally different. :-(

Re:Euro

[Jugalator]

looking fine here, both in Vera Serif and Mono. :-/ But I'm using Windows XP although it shouldn't matter since it's the same font. Hmm.

Main differences with Verdana

[P�l@Paris]

now for my .02$

Main differences between Vera and Verdana fonts, wich both look - almost - exactly the same under windows :

Verdana in Uppercase is slightly wider

"Holes" in letter, like in "P", are completely round in Vera whereas the straight line creates a break in the edge of the "hole" in verdana - Which looks far more stylish in Vera

Uppercase "Q" are straight in Vera and curved in Verdana - Which, again, looks more stylish in Vera
Lowercase "y" have the same difference, but Vera and Verdana inverted - strange ...

Lowercase "j" and uppercase "I" and "J" are quite "serifed" in Verdana and not in Vera - and that, for a general purpose screen font is quite ennoying in Vera, because it is far less readeable (but less stylish ;) )

I reckon because of the readeablility of "i" and "j", I'll stick to Verdana

I'm still amazed how much the two fonts look alike.

You're right, it's useless.

[Futurepower(R)]

Since I didn't like the bold, I didn't think further about the font. You're right, Bitstream Vera Serif is useless without italics.

Re:You're right, it's useless.

[90XDoubleSide]

I can't beleive people have overlooked this. How in the hell do you design a font with no italics?!? And it's a serif font, no less, so people can't even use simulated oblique on it!

Dang.

[Decimal]

That's dissapointing. No Bitstream Vera Mono w/ serif?

Mac OS X is not UNIX�

[yerricde]

Mac OS X is standard UNIX.

Mac OS X may conform to parts of the Single UNIX Specification, but because Apple does not pay royalties to the Open Group, Mac OS X does not carry the UNIX® brand.

Besides, grandparent meant "standard" as in X11 as opposed to Quartz. There is a widely adopted public specification for X11; where's the public specification for Quartz?

Re:Mac OS X is not UNIX�

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac OS X may conform to parts of the Single UNIX Specification, but because Apple does not pay royalties to the Open Group, Mac OS X does not carry the UNIX® brand.

That's fine and good. You've explained why Mac OS X is not UNIX®. Now explain why Mac OS X is not UNIX.

Besides, grandparent meant "standard" as in X11 as opposed to Quartz.

X11 is not part of UNIX. It's just an application that runs on top of UNIX. There's nothing "standard UNIX" about X11.

where's the public specification for Quartz?

Right here. That's a start. You'd find more detailed information on developer.apple.com, if you were inclined to look, but it's obvious from your post that you're not.

Re:Mac OS X is not UNIX�

[yerricde]

Now explain why Mac OS X is not UNIX.

For the same reason Canon does not make Xerox photocopiers. The term "UNIX" has a specific meaning in U.S. law.

There's nothing "standard UNIX" about X11.

True, but take it in context. The first graphical environments that come to mind when one thinks about UNIX-mark-bearing systems are X11-based: GNOME, KDE, Window Maker, CDE, etc.

You'd find more detailed information on developer.apple.com

Now I'm curious. Does developer.apple.com contain enough information for a third party to produce a source-compatible clone of the Quartz graphics layer?

Re:Mac OS X is not UNIX�

[Anonymous Coward]

The term "UNIX" has a specific meaning in U.S. law.

So does Xerox. Doesn't change the fact that any machine that makes an electrostatic photocopy is a xerox machine.

The first graphical environments that come to mind when one thinks about UNIX-mark-bearing systems are X11-based: GNOME, KDE, Window Maker, CDE, etc.

No way. That was true in the Bad Old Days, but now Mac OS X is the top of that particular heap. If you're stuck using Gnome, KDE, Window Maker, CDE, etc., there's a way out now!

Does developer.apple.com contain enough information for a third party to produce a source-compatible clone of the Quartz graphics layer?

What does "source-compatible" mean?

Re:Mac OS X is not UNIX�

[yggdrazil]

The term "UNIX" has a specific meaning in U.S. law

I'm a coder, not a lawyer. I don't care. I despise parts of trademark and patent law, which has become corrupted. I refuse to let stupid lawyers define UNIX for me. I'm smart enough to recognice a UNIX system when I see one.

Now, will all the lawyers please leave the room, so that us techies can continue to talk uninterrupted?

Re:Mac OS X is not UNIX�

[Jimithing DMB]

First of all, I think Apple does in fact license the UNIX name from the open group (at least I heard they did). Furthermore, if you go to their website you will see the term UNIX based with a notice that UNIX is a trademark of the open group.

Second, there actually isn't anything "standard UNIX" about X11. X11 happens to be the only graphical environment ever available for Linux (and any other free UNIX as far as I know) but it certainly doesn't even come close to being the only one. The first graphical UNIX environments that come to my mind are NeWS, CDE, and Nextstep. Only one of those (CDE) is X11 based. The other two ran on display postscript servers. Now if you are the typical linux weenie that frequents slashdot, then I suppose you'd think of GNOME and KDE first and throw in Window Maker and CDE for good measure, but that's not what I think of when I think traditional UNIX desktop.

Of course, if you don't already know, Mac OS X is essentially Nextstep with a display PDF window server instead of dispaly postscript window server, more compatibility with traditional Mac programming techniques, and a few other modern goodies.

I'm somewhat puzzled by your last question. Seeing as how all of the APIs are public and many of them come from Nextstep (which is released publicly as the Openstep specification) I find it amusing that you even bothered to ask. YES, it can be done. NO, it will not be done. Why? Because no one wants to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Now if you mean porting a Cocoa application from OS X to another UNIX, then you can already do that. GNUstep implements as closesly as possible the latest Openstep specification. It's been a work in progress for about a decade now. It was (perhaps still is?) the official GNU GUI. It's really in dire need of good developers willing to finish the core programming then modernize it. Unfortunately, too many developers seem to be interested in GNOME and KDE-- lame attempts to copy Microsoft Windows. Perhaps that's because a lot of the talent in the pool these days has used a lot of MSW. That's a shame because it's probably one of the worst GUIs ever created and is a horrible reference point. C'est la vie.

GNO GO

[Anonymous Coward]

As with anything put out from GNOME, you have to be running a very specific version of Red Hat or Mandrake to get anything working with it.

These fonts are completely ignored by Xtt and Freetype on Debian, FreeBSD, and any other system (except Windows) that they are deposited on.

Other fonts in the same locations work perfectly of course, so I'll chalk this up to yet another infectious GNOME'ism that doesn't work, much like the rest of their stuff lately...

Has anyone actually gotten these to work on non-Red Hat/non-Mandrake systems?

Italics may be more expensive to design

[yerricde]

Agreed. Why would they release a font without real italics?

I'm guessing because font design costs money, good-looking real italics are harder to make than roman type, and Bitstream didn't want to develop something like that and release it under a less restrictive license than it uses for most fonts. Now before anybody counters that the price sheet doesn't give higher prices for italics, it may be possible that the roman subsidizes the italic to an extent.

Re:Italics may be more expensive to design

[1u3hr]

I'm guessing because font design costs money, good-looking real italics are harder to make than roman type

Well, obviously it is about money. It does take time and thought to make any font. But, having dabbled in fonts for a while, I don't think italics in general are "harder" than roman to design. They're more fluid, being based on a script form and often a designer indulges himself a bit and makes the italic a little more fanciful than the roman.

In any case, I hope and pray that true italic companions are in the works. But seeing as they are in the public domain, quite likely we will see some contributed by the community, though Truetype hinting (which is what makes them look good at screen resolution) is somewhat of a black art.

Can I use this font in OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

put the fonts in .font and /usr/share/font (overkill but whatever) and changed all my apps to use it but open office still doesn't see it. What can I do to make it see them?
Thanks

Design patents and font copyrights

[yerricde]

You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name.

It's commonly known that USA law lets the font publisher trademark the name and copyright the program containing Bezier outline data, but it also lets the font designer design-patent the look. But the European Union and Japan also let the font publisher copyright the look.

Re:Anyway, You All Forgot The Most Important Thing

[Jugalator]

The best part with monospaced fonts is that you can use the shorthand form like ":)" without having it look bad! Since I'm currently using Vera Mono in this edit box I'm typing in, I can see everything is fine here. But it's still a hassle since Slashdot posts defaults to your standard serif typeface, so you have to enclose it in TT tags. Unless you want to have it look like a frog, of course. You can't get everything I guess. ;-)

Setting it in Win2k?

[yerricde]

I just installed these on my Windows machine. The monospace font is excellent.

So how do I set Command Prompt and other Windows 2000 console applications to use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono instead of Lucida Console?

Re:Setting it in Win2k?

[zsazsa]

I found a howto guide here though it looks like it replaces all usage of Lucida Console with Vera Mono. It's worth a try.

Re:Italics?

[1u3hr]

I dug around and found this on gnomedesktop.org.

Re: Vera fonts status...
by jg on Wednesday, April 16 @ 13:58:57 EST

No Serif italic or bold italic for the time being. Sorry.

Jim Lyles is pretty happy (as happy as one can be) about the artificial obliquing that Xft/ Fontconfig will perform, so you can get something that looks like it in applications like mozilla.
- Jim

Well, I hope he reconsiders.

While your at it, download more GPL fonts

[Dustismo]

While your installing Vera may as well install some more open source fonts. http://www.dustismo.com/site/fonts.html -Dustin

Fight anti-aliasing!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can start by donating to the "buy me a high-resolution moitor" fund. After all, if I had a 1600x1200 monitor, there would be no need to antialias anything!

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[unixbob]

This "shut up and be grateful that you're getting it for free" attitude is yet another in the lost list of reasons why the "open source" community is destined to remain a fringe group at best

Two things.
First is - so what if it remains a fringe group thing? Most of the Open Source projects are there because people enjoy what they do, and others appreciate them. World domination is not on the agenda
Second, you are getting it for free, and are under no obligation to use it. If you don't like the way it works, or don't like the politics behind it, or don't agree with it's license, or think the code is substandard, whatever; then don't use it. If you preferred an older version, then don't upgrade. If enough people feel like you then fork the code. Look at the transition from gcc to egcs to see how this can be a successful approach.

The benefit of the Open Source UNIX environment is that it is all about choice. Granted the OP is merely presenting an informed (albeit one sided) opinion. But I have little time for people who don't actively contribute to projects but seem to have little problem with pointing out where the people doing all the work are failing. Esepecially when they are posting anonymously and aren't prepared to stand by their statements

Re:Italics?

[jg]

Jim would of course prefer to have the
time to build serif italic faces; but the
artificial obliqing (for most, but not all
people) is preferable than having the
faces indistinguisable or choosing a different
family.

He did say if he somehow got the opportunity,
he'd build them at the angle we use in fontconfig
by default (I think it is 10degrees).

I believe you can tell fontconfig not to use the
artificial obliquing if you want to.
- Jim

Re:superpower?

[Anonymous Coward]

It must suck to post at -1 by default... That's pretty lame too.

Bitstream Vera x-height

[Scott Wunsch]

Does anybody know off-hand what the x-height for the Bitstream Vera fonts is? Or better yet, does anybody know how I can determine that for myself?

This value is useful for the font-size-adjust CSS parameter, to make sure that if font substitution takes place, the resulting font still has the same apparent size as the designer intended. font-size-adjust basically defines the ratio between the height of the font, and its x-height (the height of a lower-case letter).

I found a screenshot

[Anonymous Coward]

Found a screenshot of the fonts at MadPenguin.org.....

http://www.madpenguin.org/images/reviews/vera/vera .png

I for one am thinking they look pretty good ;-)

Re:Italics?

[1u3hr]

I believe you can tell fontconfig not to use the artificial obliquing if you want to.

Well, yes, that removes the faked italics, but doesn't give you real ones. It's necessary to have distinguishable italics, so if you use these fonts at all you'd have to leave it on.

The local newspaper for the last five years, since their last redesign, has indiscriminately used obliqued and italic -- sometimes within the same article. Obviously no one at the newspaper even notices. But to me it's like fingernails on a blackboard. And working in DTP, I'd consider it a disaster should obliqued text be used in a printed book (even worse than using typewriter quotes instead of real ones).

Another Beautiful Font Mozilla won't Download

[drgreening]

I love beautiful fonts, but Mozilla has dropped the ball on downloadable fonts, so this news is only half-relevant to web developers. We can put the font on our personal machines, but I can't build a web site that relies on Vera.

The New York Times and other font-savvy internet publishers have long stated their disinterest in recommending Mozilla because it cannot accurately render documents in some of the fonts they specify.

What is interfering with implementing downloadable fonts in Mozilla? I've heard from Mozilla folks that BitStream is the problem, but here it seems that BitStream has gone to great lengths to help the Gnome folks, which is likely a smaller audience than Mozilla folks.

Flumoxed and grumpy, I nevertheless remain your humble servant.

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[Anonymous Coward]

World domination is not on the agenda

Oh, whatever.

If you don't like the way it works, or don't like the politics behind it, or don't agree with it's license, or think the code is substandard, whatever; then don't use it.

Exactly. See? It's that "our way or the highway" shit that causes all the problems.

But I have little time for people who don't actively contribute to projects but seem to have little problem with pointing out where the people doing all the work are failing.

Then stick to writing software that nobody will use.

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[unixbob]

Then stick to writing software that nobody will use

Thanks for allowing me to spend my personal time doing what I like. And you may stick to complaining that no-one does it the way you want it and doing nothing to get off your own arse to make it better.

Maybe My Opinion�s a Little Slanted�but

[X-wes]

From the Bitstream website:

Font Previews for Bitstream Vera

From the various articles, it is said that 10 fonts will be donated in total. That seems to match.

But...what if I suddenly want to type in Serif Oblique? Umm...anyone?

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[Anonymous Coward]

And you may stick to complaining that no-one does it the way you want it and doing nothing to get off your own arse to make it better.

Actually, what I do is give money to those who do do it the way I want it. Apple, Sun, SGI, Microsoft: these companies get my computer-money, and I get precisely what I want in return. And nobody EVER tells me to get off my "arse," whatever that means.

blows in ie

[picketfences]

.."They work for Windows and Mac users too!".. this font blows in ie (with cleartype or not). yet to try in konqueror(FreeBSD).

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[unixbob]

Then you get what you pay for

Not so easy

[ArmorFiend]

Man, for all the talk on how great these fonts are, people are really reticient to actually tell how to install for such-and-such distro. Thank you for bucking that trend. Now I just have to find someone else that goes through the ewie gooey for woody.

Re:Not so easy

[ArmorFiend]

I am very frustrated by this process!
I followed the abiword how to install truetype fonts directions carefully, adding /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10 and /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera to my /ets/X11/fs/config file. I also ran ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale mkfontdir in each of the directories. So, please, somebody, tell me why xfontsel can't find it?

Re:Windows port? OOPS!

[cpeterso]

my bad. I assumed the new font names would begin with "Vera ...", but they begin with "Bitstream Vera ...". The fonts work, but they are rather fuzzy..

TTF to Type 1 converter

[yerricde]

There are many people that won't take this font seriously unless it's Postscript

Tools are available that translate TTF into Adobe Type 1 format.

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. ;-)

Debian package

[ion_]

These fonts are packaged for Debian, too.

Remember: That is just your opinion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Myself, I find Verdana preferable to every font on my system -- especially Helvetica. The difference between the two (to me) seems so striking that it didn't surprise me at all to hear that the typographer who designed Verdana spent 1-2 years working on it.

You've got an uneven comparison in that screenshot

[Anonymous Coward]

Vera is anti-aliased. Verdana isn't.

Spacing not right

[mbrod]

't' has to much space after it in "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono".

Anybody else think so?

Re:Spacing not right

[Anonymous Coward]

.. since it's a monospaced font, it got the same width as every other character..

Whining

[Anonymous Coward]

For me to take Linux seriously as a desktop typographic platform, it needs a good WYSIWYG environment. And I'd much rather have a good clone of ClarisWorks 4.0 than a lousy clone of MS Word $most_recent. People should be able to use it in order to get something to print properly without having to think about, say, HTML tags and their propriety in every situation. Being able to edit a page at the PostScript or XML level is nice, and I'm all for proper XHTML on the web, but typographically, italic just means italic.

And of course I need a decent font and font engine. I don't need bold, and I only need one monospace font (preferably Lucida Typewriter) on my whole system. What I need, and what I don't see are, in order of importance:

1. Italics. That's absolutely non-negotiable. A font without italics is a broken font.
2. Unicode. If not Unicode, at least the ability to properly render any language in the Latin alphabet. That goes way beyond the default Windows and Mac and Linux 8-bit character sets.
3. Text figures.
4. Small caps. Contrary to extremely popular belief, small caps are not just small and capital they are carefully made to be well-spaced and well-proportioned.
5. Ligatures.
6. Good hinting for screen display.
7. A good naming system. I'd prefer go the old-style Macintosh pseudoobject-oriented way: select, say, Vera, then italic, instead of VerItal. Typographically, a font is a collection of sub-fonts, and that's how I want to be able to think of it. If the filesystem represents them on the disk as different files, the word processor should lie to me. (In the same way, a lot of my music files have silly filenames (e.g., truncated from storage on FAT or HFS), but I only care about the way the song sounds and what the id3 tags say.)

"Source compatible"

[yerricde]

If you're stuck using Gnome, KDE, Window Maker, CDE, etc., there's a way out now!

Not for me there isn't. I'm poor, and unlike x86 computers, there aren't any super-cheap Macintosh computers.

What does "source-compatible" mean?

It means I can take the source code of a a Cocoa app that uses complicated Quartz calls, recompile it on gnustep, and It Just Works®.

Re:"Source compatible"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not "source compatible," you moron. That's just implementing an API! If you want to implement the Core Graphics API, knock yourself out! Implement it to run on your piece-of-shit $99 computer or whatever the hell.

Here's what you do. Go get yourself a job. When you do, go buy a Mac. Poof. Problem solved.

Re:"Source compatible"

[yerricde]

That's just implementing an API!

I (may have mis)used it to mean implementing the API in a way that works when actual applications are recompiled with it, as opposed to how Windows NT "implements" POSIX.

Go get yourself a job.

CareerBuilder.com turned up 0 results for a programmer fresh out of college in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Can you help me further?

Re:"Source compatible"

[Anonymous Coward]

CareerBuilder.com turned up 0 results for a programmer fresh out of college in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Can you help me further?

Yes. Get a job driving a taxi. Or at a bookstore. Become a courier. Wait tables. Deliver pizzas. Sell cars. Write a book. Work construction.

There are lots of options open to a kid your age. Remember: you are not your college major. Get a fuckin job!

"+5 Funny?"

[Overly Critical Guy]

What's so funny about using "that badboy" Wingdings? It seems somewhat juvenile to me, but what do I know...people around here will moderate up anything if it's ridiculous or not clever.

Re:"+5 Funny?"

[AssFace]

I hate it when you drink and then post dad.

Re:"+5 Funny?"

[Overly Critical Guy]

It helps me sleep with your mother, son.

Re:"+5 Funny?"

[AssFace]

That reminds me of one of my favorite jokes.

These college kids are sitting at a bar, having some drinks and discussing the days events. This older guy comes up and taps one of the kids on the shoulder. The kid turns around and the older man says "I fucked your mom!"
The guys were all very taken aback by this and even more so when the guy just calmly said "go home" to the older man and turned around.
The older man then smacked the guy on the back and said "Your mom sucked my cock!"
Again, the college kids were shocked, and even more so when their friend remained calm and just tried to push the older man towards the door.
But then the older man followed him right back and spun the kid around on the bar stool and yelled out "I fucked your mom in the ass!"
This time, the college kids thought for sure that it was going to be go time - I fight surely had to happen now.
But no, the kid just stood up and said "Listen dad, you've had too much to drink - just go home."

Perhaps it is only funny to me because it reminds me of my dad.

Re:"+5 Funny?"

[Overly Critical Guy]

I figured it was his dad at the beginning of the joke.

Any more brainbusters?

Re:"+5 Funny?"

[AssFace]

glad to see you could grasp the theme of that which we are talking about.

I'm proud of you. seriously.

Re:"+5 Funny?"

[Overly Critical Guy]

Oh, seriously?

doesn't work on dark backgrounds

[Trepidity]

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but the AA in the xft build of Mozilla makes fonts unreadable on black backgrounds. It seems it works by basically blurring the fonts and letting the black bleed into the white a bit, which works beautifully when it's black text on a white background (the black of the text bleeds a little into the white of the background, smoothing out pixellation), but is completely unreadable when it's white text on a black background (the black of the background bleeds into the white that was supposed to be the text). It's not just Mozilla either; the gtk2 builds of gaim have the same problem.

Re:doesn't work on dark backgrounds

[tortoise]

Check out the RELEASENOTES; there's a small section on a problem with gamma correction Xft/X Render which messes up the rendering of white fonts on black backgrounds.

Nimbus Sans

[Sir_Stinksalot]

Just curious if anyone here likes the nimbus sans font. I like the Vera stuff but the width is a little much for me. I am going to give it a try for a while but Nimbus Sans is my favorite so far for normal every day use. In my opinion its the best font that comes with some linux distros.

Re:Nimbus Sans

[Simon]

yeah, it's quite good at 10pt provided that it is anti-aliased. I don't like reading anti-aliased text at that size though, and Nimbus isn't so great without it. It's readable, but Vera comes out much better (MS's Arial is much better too, which I was using until yesterday. ;-) ) Vera is less condensed than Nimbus and Arial, but not that much really and I'm quickly growing to like the improved readability that it offers.

(Wow, 'o's that are circular instead of elliptic, or just boxes with the corners cut off).

--
Simon

A job, without driving?

[yerricde]

Get a job driving a taxi. Become a courier. Deliver pizzas.

I failed the test for an operator driver license, let alone a passenger chauffeur license.

Or at a bookstore. Wait tables. Sell cars. Write a book. Work construction.

Do those jobs pay enough to let me both support myself and pay off my student loan?

Re:A job, without driving?

[Anonymous Coward]

I failed the test for an operator driver license, let alone a passenger chauffeur license.

Your mental defiencies are not my problem.

Do those jobs pay enough to let me both support myself and pay off my student loan?

Yes. I know this for a fact; I did it myself. If you're just sitting around waiting for a $50,000-a-year job to come bite you on the ass, you're an idiot. Get out there and start pulling in minimum wage. You'll survive, and you'll learn something.

Re:Italics?

[Tet]

The local newspaper for the last five years, since their last redesign, has indiscriminately used obliqued and italic

Newspapers no longer care about typesetting quality. The Times used to be the standard against which everyone was judged -- the world's most popular typeface was even designed for them. But now, it's embarassingly poor. The reason is because about 5 years ago, they switched from using Atex to using Unisys' Hermes typesetting system. While Hermes certainly does a lot more, in terms of providing live feeds, and so on, it doesn't come close to Atex (or indeed, any other serious typestting system) in terms of typesetting quality. Hell, it doesn't even do ligatures! It can handle a very limited set of accented characters, and has numerous other faults. I think (though I'm not 100% sure) that the reason is its reliance on the underlying Windows font handling routines, rather than using its own. Either way, I was embarassed to be associated with it when I worked there. But management just saw a system with a pretty GUI front end and were sold. Quality didn't come into the equation at all.

Re:Italics?

[1u3hr]

Newspapers no longer care about typesetting quality.

Publishers in general. Especially on book covers you now often see typewriter quotes instead of typographic ones. I put his down to simple ignorance, as though every decent DTP app has some kind of "smart quotes" function to make up for the idiocy of the keyboard layout that gives you easy access to fairly esoteric characters like ^ {} | \, all good for programmers but hardly ever seen in prose, while completely omitting real single and double quotes (I was particular annoyed that the conventional use of ` and ' as left and right quotes -- i.e. they usually printed as the typographic characters -- in DOS and Unix got turned into the odd geometric representation we get now. Of course if you do turn on the translation, then you get the problem of how the hell to actually write straight ' and " when you need to, or force an apostrophe instead of an open quote at the beginning of a word ( 'er indoors).

I've just gone through over a dozen revision cycles of a book that the layout people made graphically very nice, but fucked up every quote and dash, despite my carefully encoding them in the text, and warning them to take care with that specifically.

Another project was a paperback release of a book originally done by Random House. Typographically nice, but they obviously never bothered to spellcheck it, a simple new layout turned into a complete copyedit when I started to proof it.

Offtopic entirely, but what mod is reading this?

[Gropo]

Hey, I sent a mail to your yahoo spam account re: decotura, but you never replied back on your 'real' mail account.

Send me another (to above address) so I know where to send you an attachment/url/whatever...