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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
-- -- --
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Now. Download, extract the tarball, drop the ttfs into your fonts directory.
click here
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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