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

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.

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?

Postscript?

[truenoir]

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

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.

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: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.

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.