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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.
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I did a little googlage:
n ts /vera/
http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fo
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
Now. Download, extract the tarball, drop the ttfs into your fonts directory.
click here
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.)
LOL, I solved my own problem. Cygwin's "tar jxf" command helpfully extracted the files without giving me permission to read them afterwards :)
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.
Yeah you're retarded :)
Here's a link.
here
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.
Try pfaedit. The user interface is rather spartan but it is very powerful.
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.
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.
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.
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA== RV/hBCLKKcSTP5UFK3kqsg==
XFree86 --
.fonts dir.
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
Silly people.
ACK
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.
On most Gnome machines, you can just copy them to /usr/share/fonts.
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.
Ottawa was Optima, Erie was Eras, Switzerland was Helvetica, etc...
Here's a handy-dandy lookup guide.
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.
The Anti-Blog
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
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?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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.
still reading?
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.
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.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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).
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:
Xft2 description from fontconfig.org
And last but not least the freetype description:
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 =).
still reading?
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.
While your installing Vera may as well install some more open source fonts. http://www.dustismo.com/site/fonts.html -Dustin
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Found a screenshot of the fonts at MadPenguin.org.....
a .png
;-)
http://www.madpenguin.org/images/reviews/vera/ver
I for one am thinking they look pretty good
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.
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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:
d ana/default.htm
http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/ver
There's no 'panacea of fonts'. Any typographer knows that different typefaces are appropriate in different situations.