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Bitstream/Gnome Release Vera Font Family

Posted by michael on from the grand-unified-font-solution-still-elusive dept.

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.

22 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Windows port? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

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

  2. .otf by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

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

  3. Work on Windows? by DrXym · · Score: 1, Interesting

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

  4. copyright, etc by ergonal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:copyright, etc by liquidsin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

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    2. Re:copyright, etc by MarsCtrl · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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.
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  5. open/free font editors by wfmcwalter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

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  6. Postscript? by truenoir · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  7. Sorry for being dumb by Loosewire · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

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    1. Re:Sorry for being dumb by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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  8. Re:Here's slashdot in Bitstream Vera Serif by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  9. Redhat 9 by kajoob · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

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  10. Re:Initial thoughts on Vera by Jon+Abbott · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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  11. Relative Font Sizes by Skidge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  12. Re:I'm obviously retarded by Ponty · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  13. Re:Finally, a decent monospaced font! by YellowBook · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

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  14. Re:I'm obviously retarded by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

  15. Computer Modern? by N1KO · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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).

  16. no latin-2 :( by szo · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

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  17. Re:I'm obviously retarded by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  18. Why not UTF-8 encoding and default XFree86 fonts? by Quietti · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

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  19. Main differences with Verdana by P�l@Paris · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.