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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.
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
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.