Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I'm using them right now, and they're simply beautiful. I suggest someone mirrors them before the site is slashdotted...
New fonts are like christmas. It's like getting a
new version of your favorite mp3 player or P2P
client with new stuff added. Free stuff rules.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I followed the links in the article and glanced over it and even searched on Bitstream's own site using their font finder...
I just want to see what the fonts look like without having to install/download the actual files.
I'm sure that it would be far too silly for them to have all of this talk and not have a link that shows what they look like - so I'm obviously retarded for not finding said link.
Anyone want to help a special needs kid and give me a link to what the font looks like?
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I did a little googlage:
n ts /vera/
http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fo
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
why no opentype? wasnt that meant to be the next big thing?
Now. Download, extract the tarball, drop the ttfs into your fonts directory.
"They work for Windows and Mac users too!"
did you read the summary?
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
They don't for me. I double click on any .ttf file and XP complains "The requested file was not a valid font file.".
Considering that one of Linux/Gnome/KDE's weakest points has been its poor support for fonts.
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this. The early fonts that came with X were simply horrible when compared to what MS was offering at the time. With better looking fonts, we are one step closer to widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
click here
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.
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?
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
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.
What you say is interesting, but the fact that you post anonymously makes the reader think you have an anonymous agenda. If you give your name we can read whether you have a particular axe to grind with the GNOME project, or whether you have an objective argument. But you're still off-topic anyway
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
Works perfectly on my Mac OS X box, just dropped the files in my ~/Library/Fonts
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.
Any chance for Postscript versions of the font too in case someone wants to use it for serious printing?
Vera sans seems very similar to Verdana, while Vera serif seems very similar to Century. I never previously considered Verdana and Century to be similar (disregarding serifs of course), but Vera draws this strange similarity together quite easily.
:^)
OK, I admit it, I'm a font geek... I can readily identify what fonts that restaurants use on their menus, and so on. If I ever became a superhero, that would probably be one of my superpowers.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
So shut up and use KDE? Why are you trying to convince other people not to use their preferred desktop environment?
Vera!
What has become of you?
Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Windows: Drop into the winnt\system32\fonts folder (I wouldn't be surprised if right-clicking a font gave you the option of doing that).
Macintosh: Drop into the System:Fonts folder. Newer Finders might magic-route it if you drop it onto the system folder
BeOS: Copy to the home/settings/fonts/ folder, start up the fonts preferences, and click rescan button
XFree86.... search for half an hour to find where fonts are stored. Copy it there. Restart X. wonder why it doesn't show. search man pages for half an hour. Search HOWTOS for an hour. Realize your copy of XFree86 doesn't support tretype fonts. Reboot into windows.
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==
Where are these new fonts suppposed to be copied to on Linux? /usr/share/fonts ? and does it need to be in a subdirectory? I know i'm supposed to know this, but it'd be nice if they explained on the site anyway.
$cat
I'm not complaining.. so many fonts are offered for free out there.. add a couple more to the list and put a smile on your face. =) *Make your AMD run cooler! Remove what you don't need! Ph33r my f4n!
Why are you posting this rant, yet again? If you are that unhappy with the current direction of Gnome, fork it or don't use it.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
It's really good to finally have a high-quality free font set.
FWIW. YMMV.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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
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
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
Tried Vera on a Win XP machine. The Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (the full name of the font) font looks great!! Thanks to everyone who made it available. Lucida Console is an excellent monospaced font, but it does not have enough space between lines. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono has sensible spacing.
It is very, very difficult to make a good font. Those who are knowledgeable about computers tend to be very insensitive to graphical clarity, I've found, although that is changing, it seems.
Bitstream Vera Serif is useless to me because it has a terrible bold. This is a typical failing of fonts. Bitstream Vera Serif Bold is really a very different-looking font, not a bold of Vera Serif. Vera Serif, not bold, looks great, however.
To be truly useful, fonts meant for general use need a demi-bold. Sometimes you want a full bold, and sometimes a full bold is too heavy.
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?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
should I use something else to extract them? If so, what?
You probably got a spurious .tar added after the filename. Check the filename before attempting to open it with Winzip. If the name is "blahblah.tar.gz.tar", just delete the last .tar from the name and try again.
HTH
-- Bander
What we need more of is science!
Thank you Bitstream!
Let's hope all the major distros eventually adopt these true-type fonts as the defacto defaults. I had no problems doing the ttmkfont trick myself, but I'm sure it was a bit confusing for many newbies. This will make Linux/Gnome/KDE/etc much more easier for the non-tech crowd to adopt!
That was it. Thanks Bander.
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.
These are too wide. For fixed-width terminal fonts, I like the jmk collection. I haven't looked at the serif vera, so maybe it is better than, say, Times, but I don't tend to use serif on screen anyway.
Stick them in whatever directory you want, if that directory isn't already in XF86Config, then add it. Run "xset +fp /new/font/path" then "xset fp rehash".
In that dir, run mkfontdir and then "ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale". Should work.
They're ugly, and they hurt my eyes. Hey kids, lets anti-alias everything!
Very disappointing to see that the serif form has only a regular and bold form, no true italics, so your screenshot shows the loathsome synthetic oblique version -- ie, just distorted the roman, no changes in letterform. Most true italic fonts have distinctive forms for "a", "g", "f". So I'll be sticking to Times or Georgia for my screen fonts. I really HATE it when the OS messes with my fonts -- if there's no real italics, don't give me ersatz
How does it perform with smilies?
The slight offset of the monospaced closing round bracket gives your smiles a new and cheeky character of their own.
Check out some smilies
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
Right you are. I got excited when I noticed it includes a monospaced version, because I'm always on the lookout for a new and better terminal emulator font.
I installed Vera on Windows 2K and the 8-point, my preferred telnet window size, looked absolutely like crap. Turned anti-aliasing (called "Smooth edges of fonts" for Windows dummies) on and it's nice.
I haven't liked the soft look of anti-aliased fonts in the past, which is why I had it off, but maybe I'll give this a try for a few days and see what happens.
I'm sure you meant it as a troll but nothing stops you writing TTF render engines for the console frame buffer. Many language users already do use bitmap consoles and tools like bterm to see 'console' displays.
I can't find Gill Sans on my obsolete Windows XP Professional partition. Are you sure it does not come with MS Office or where did you get it?
Moritz
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).
There's a significant difference between truetype fonts and softfonts. Keep in mind that the standard console will only ever support fixed-size, monospace fonts. VGA cards are limited to 256 or, perhaps 512 characters. Given those constraints, it is still possible to write a piece of software that will render truetype fonts on an ordinary vga console, but such a piece would be pretty pointless. The advantages of truetype fonts are flexible sizes, variable spacing and (now) anti-aliasing. Any truetype font rendered to a 8x16 black-and-white matrix is going to look crap. Now, it certainly is possible to write a truetype renderer for the framebuffer console. But why? The whole advantage of the console framebuffer is lack of bloat. If you want to sacrifice speed in exchange for pretty letters, you'd use X. Unless you want to embed a truetype renderer in the kernel, that is. I shudder at the very thought.
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?
Would it really hurt to include the characters and ? Damn. Still no good font for us :(
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
Slightly offtopic, but take a look at this (Taken from another thread in this article):
/usr/share/fonts"
"mv *.ttf ~/.fonts"
"Download fonts. Drop them onto desktop. Use KDE's font installer to add them to your list of fonts."
"On most Gnome machines, you can just copy them to
"On mandrake: Untar, run 'drakfont', click on the directory containing the unarchived fonts. Click install."
Do you guys realize that this means there are at least *FOUR* different ways to install fonts on Linux (five actually, if you're using an older version of X)? Ever wonder why some clamor for desktop/distribution consistency? At least in Windows and MacOS there's ONE way to do something this simple.
I agree with a lot of what you say because I prefer to be able to configure things and make my desktop personal. But I think you have it wrong when you think that the average person will want to change their desktop. The next time you think everyone or even a majority of people want to change their configuration just go look at the closest windows users desktop. I guarantee that 9 times out of 10 it will be grey or blue like the defaults in windows. The only thing that really changes is the background.
I think that gnome is nice I like it and I think it looks beautiful right our of the box. But since I like configurability I use KDE. But for a fairly fast and pretty desktop gnome is a good choice. If you dont like it you can feel free to fork it and start your own DE, or switch to another DE.
"We can no longer live as rats... we know too much." -Secret of NIMH
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.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
On my laptop 1400x1050 LCD, antialiasing Vera gives me an almost instant headache. It is quite impressive. The fonts are nice, but I'm forced to use them with anti-aliasing off. (Would this be a double negative?)
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
The Vera family produces some very nice results with OS X's immaculate font rendering engine:
vera.png
Is it me, or did they actually forget to make a Euro symbol? :-(
When I type option-shift-2 on my mac, I get something totally different.
if your pants fit well, it's not only because of the pants
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.
Since I didn't like the bold, I didn't think further about the font. You're right, Bitstream Vera Serif is useless without italics.
That's dissapointing. No Bitstream Vera Mono w/ serif?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Mac OS X is standard UNIX.
Mac OS X may conform to parts of the Single UNIX Specification, but because Apple does not pay royalties to the Open Group, Mac OS X does not carry the UNIX® brand.
Besides, grandparent meant "standard" as in X11 as opposed to Quartz. There is a widely adopted public specification for X11; where's the public specification for Quartz?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Agreed. Why would they release a font without real italics?
I'm guessing because font design costs money, good-looking real italics are harder to make than roman type, and Bitstream didn't want to develop something like that and release it under a less restrictive license than it uses for most fonts. Now before anybody counters that the price sheet doesn't give higher prices for italics, it may be possible that the roman subsidizes the italic to an extent.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name.
It's commonly known that USA law lets the font publisher trademark the name and copyright the program containing Bezier outline data, but it also lets the font designer design-patent the look. But the European Union and Japan also let the font publisher copyright the look.
Will I retire or break 10K?
They look fine on OSX. I still prefer Lucida Grande, but I like Vera slightly better than Verdana.
The best part with monospaced fonts is that you can use the shorthand form like ":)" without having it look bad! Since I'm currently using Vera Mono in this edit box I'm typing in, I can see everything is fine here. But it's still a hassle since Slashdot posts defaults to your standard serif typeface, so you have to enclose it in TT tags. Unless you want to have it look like a frog, of course. You can't get everything I guess. ;-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I just installed these on my Windows machine. The monospace font is excellent.
So how do I set Command Prompt and other Windows 2000 console applications to use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono instead of Lucida Console?
Will I retire or break 10K?
While your installing Vera may as well install some more open source fonts. http://www.dustismo.com/site/fonts.html -Dustin
This "shut up and be grateful that you're getting it for free" attitude is yet another in the lost list of reasons why the "open source" community is destined to remain a fringe group at best
Two things.
First is - so what if it remains a fringe group thing? Most of the Open Source projects are there because people enjoy what they do, and others appreciate them. World domination is not on the agenda
Second, you are getting it for free, and are under no obligation to use it. If you don't like the way it works, or don't like the politics behind it, or don't agree with it's license, or think the code is substandard, whatever; then don't use it. If you preferred an older version, then don't upgrade. If enough people feel like you then fork the code. Look at the transition from gcc to egcs to see how this can be a successful approach.
The benefit of the Open Source UNIX environment is that it is all about choice. Granted the OP is merely presenting an informed (albeit one sided) opinion. But I have little time for people who don't actively contribute to projects but seem to have little problem with pointing out where the people doing all the work are failing. Esepecially when they are posting anonymously and aren't prepared to stand by their statements
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
MacOS is UNIX enough for Apple to get good marketing juice out of it, however it's different enough from most other forms of UNIX in terms of the components it uses to be rightfully excluded from this comparison. Actually, he should have really limited himself to free software platforms (ie Linux/FreeBSD/etc) because AFAIK no commercial unix except the new Solaris uses FreeType. MacOS certainly does not.
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
This value is useful for the font-size-adjust CSS parameter, to make sure that if font substitution takes place, the resulting font still has the same apparent size as the designer intended. font-size-adjust basically defines the ratio between the height of the font, and its x-height (the height of a lower-case letter).
\\'
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
Well, yes, that removes the faked italics, but doesn't give you real ones. It's necessary to have distinguishable italics, so if you use these fonts at all you'd have to leave it on.
The local newspaper for the last five years, since their last redesign, has indiscriminately used obliqued and italic -- sometimes within the same article. Obviously no one at the newspaper even notices. But to me it's like fingernails on a blackboard. And working in DTP, I'd consider it a disaster should obliqued text be used in a printed book (even worse than using typewriter quotes instead of real ones).
I love beautiful fonts, but Mozilla has dropped the ball on downloadable fonts, so this news is only half-relevant to web developers. We can put the font on our personal machines, but I can't build a web site that relies on Vera.
The New York Times and other font-savvy internet publishers have long stated their disinterest in recommending Mozilla because it cannot accurately render documents in some of the fonts they specify.
What is interfering with implementing downloadable fonts in Mozilla? I've heard from Mozilla folks that BitStream is the problem, but here it seems that BitStream has gone to great lengths to help the Gnome folks, which is likely a smaller audience than Mozilla folks.
Flumoxed and grumpy, I nevertheless remain your humble servant.
Then stick to writing software that nobody will use
Thanks for allowing me to spend my personal time doing what I like. And you may stick to complaining that no-one does it the way you want it and doing nothing to get off your own arse to make it better.
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
From the Bitstream website:
Font Previews for Bitstream Vera
From the various articles, it is said that 10 fonts will be donated in total. That seems to match.
But...what if I suddenly want to type in Serif Oblique? Umm...anyone?
but these fonts are really boring.
is there something Im missing ?
Boring fonts make for good reading. I want to notice what I'm reading means, not the letters with which it is displayed.
Non-boring also means distrating, busy, and in-your-face.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
.."They work for Windows and Mac users too!".. this font blows in ie (with cleartype or not). yet to try in konqueror(FreeBSD).
Then you get what you pay for
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
Man, for all the talk on how great these fonts are, people are really reticient to actually tell how to install for such-and-such distro. Thank you for bucking that trend. Now I just have to find someone else that goes through the ewie gooey for woody.
I just downloaded the tarball and dropped the Vera
Do I need to "install" or "register" the new fonts some how?
cpeterso
One thing you can try is going to Control Panel - Fonts, that usualy picks up new fonts, at least IIRC.
my bad. I assumed the new font names would begin with "Vera
cpeterso
There are many people that won't take this font seriously unless it's Postscript
Tools are available that translate TTF into Adobe Type 1 format.
Will I retire or break 10K?
These fonts are packaged for Debian, too.
't' has to much space after it in "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono".
Anybody else think so?
If you're stuck using Gnome, KDE, Window Maker, CDE, etc., there's a way out now!
Not for me there isn't. I'm poor, and unlike x86 computers, there aren't any super-cheap Macintosh computers.
What does "source-compatible" mean?
It means I can take the source code of a a Cocoa app that uses complicated Quartz calls, recompile it on gnustep, and It Just Works®.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What's so funny about using "that badboy" Wingdings? It seems somewhat juvenile to me, but what do I know...people around here will moderate up anything if it's ridiculous or not clever.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but the AA in the xft build of Mozilla makes fonts unreadable on black backgrounds. It seems it works by basically blurring the fonts and letting the black bleed into the white a bit, which works beautifully when it's black text on a white background (the black of the text bleeds a little into the white of the background, smoothing out pixellation), but is completely unreadable when it's white text on a black background (the black of the background bleeds into the white that was supposed to be the text). It's not just Mozilla either; the gtk2 builds of gaim have the same problem.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Just curious if anyone here likes the nimbus sans font. I like the Vera stuff but the width is a little much for me. I am going to give it a try for a while but Nimbus Sans is my favorite so far for normal every day use. In my opinion its the best font that comes with some linux distros.
"We can no longer live as rats... we know too much." -Secret of NIMH
Get a job driving a taxi. Become a courier. Deliver pizzas.
I failed the test for an operator driver license, let alone a passenger chauffeur license.
Or at a bookstore. Wait tables. Sell cars. Write a book. Work construction.
Do those jobs pay enough to let me both support myself and pay off my student loan?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Newspapers no longer care about typesetting quality. The Times used to be the standard against which everyone was judged -- the world's most popular typeface was even designed for them. But now, it's embarassingly poor. The reason is because about 5 years ago, they switched from using Atex to using Unisys' Hermes typesetting system. While Hermes certainly does a lot more, in terms of providing live feeds, and so on, it doesn't come close to Atex (or indeed, any other serious typestting system) in terms of typesetting quality. Hell, it doesn't even do ligatures! It can handle a very limited set of accented characters, and has numerous other faults. I think (though I'm not 100% sure) that the reason is its reliance on the underlying Windows font handling routines, rather than using its own. Either way, I was embarassed to be associated with it when I worked there. But management just saw a system with a pretty GUI front end and were sold. Quality didn't come into the equation at all.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Publishers in general. Especially on book covers you now often see typewriter quotes instead of typographic ones. I put his down to simple ignorance, as though every decent DTP app has some kind of "smart quotes" function to make up for the idiocy of the keyboard layout that gives you easy access to fairly esoteric characters like ^ {} | \, all good for programmers but hardly ever seen in prose, while completely omitting real single and double quotes (I was particular annoyed that the conventional use of ` and ' as left and right quotes -- i.e. they usually printed as the typographic characters -- in DOS and Unix got turned into the odd geometric representation we get now. Of course if you do turn on the translation, then you get the problem of how the hell to actually write straight ' and " when you need to, or force an apostrophe instead of an open quote at the beginning of a word ( 'er indoors).
I've just gone through over a dozen revision cycles of a book that the layout people made graphically very nice, but fucked up every quote and dash, despite my carefully encoding them in the text, and warning them to take care with that specifically.
Another project was a paperback release of a book originally done by Random House. Typographically nice, but they obviously never bothered to spellcheck it, a simple new layout turned into a complete copyedit when I started to proof it.
Hey, I sent a mail to your yahoo spam account re: decotura, but you never replied back on your 'real' mail account.
Send me another (to above address) so I know where to send you an attachment/url/whatever...
I hate Grammar Nazi's