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