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Make Your Own Fonts, In a Web Browser
Dekortage writes "Although it's been up for a few weeks, today is the official launch of FontStruct, a web-based font creation tool. That's right: in your web browser, you can build your own typeface, and download it as a TrueType font. The site's user agreement requires you to release your creations online under one of the Creative Commons licenses. The typefaces tend to be a little blocky, but it's still impressive (and a great way to pass time)."
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Just what we need ... the ability for websites to easily create their own font, ignoring the hundreds of years that have gone into perfecting typography.
There's no part of copyright law that allows a tool creator to dictate how the output of the tool can be licensed.. unless, of course, there's some significant amount of copyrightable material being added to the output above and beyond what the user of the tool is supplying. For example, a compiler compiler will generate code from the input CFG and embed additional code in the output that was written by the author of the tool, so this could be claimed as his copyright, but the generated code, no matter how well it was generated, is a result of the CFG writer, and is therefore his copyright.
Of course, none of this has been tested in court.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why not use Metafont? Vastly more powerful, and available for free on any platform TeX is.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My font looks like a database connection error. :-(
-Peter
Copyright owners being megalomaniacs? Never!
How we know is more important than what we know.
About 10 years ago, when pixel fonts were all the rage. If you didn't check the site out, it allows you to create fonts in a NxN grid, using predefined primitives (circles, stars, rounded corners, etc). Not a whole lot of variety possible. If they came up with a vector-based online font creation tool, that would be something I could get excited about.
There's no way a site like this could withstand heavy traffic. I don't know why the editors would sink it like this.
It will probably be dead for days now.
...now you don't.
Pointing /. at a user-interactive site like this is going to cause tears. Lots of tears. Well, tears, or lots of heat from their servers.
The home page is now serving up:
404. Not found The requested address was not found on this server.I guess I'll bookmark it and come back tomorrow.
The Mothership
This is great. You no longer just have to waste time trying to find the font that is just right. Now, you can waste even more time by building it exactly the way you want.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
But this being a web application (like gmail/calendar/docs) it only needs a dom based browser to have fun with (which is "everyone",more or less right?) and supports the most common font format on the planet by default, truetype .ttf
Metafont isn't like any of those easy requirements, it doesnt "just work" for "everyone", it could, but it doesn't, so it fails.
thats why not METAFONT
Is it a great way to pass time in the same way that your urethra is a great way to pass a kidney stone?
Just wondering. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Mod whoever modded this -1 Redundant +1 Funny please.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
innovative site called FontStruct has been slashdoted in a record time of 3 seconds since posting the story.
No, rly, it boggles my mind. Why would one ever want to create another font ? About ten of them is roughly enough for all sane intents and purposes.
The screencast was hosted on Vimeo, so it's still up. NetworkMirror grabbed a copy before it got Slashdotted, which is over at http://www.networkmirror.com/WIuEKLdPPckjgiEb/fontstruct.fontshop.com/news/2008/05/05/introductory-screencast/index.html
(AC = no karma whoring)
That will be banned in many middle east countries and the Netherlands and will cause as Fatwa against me.
Ever letter will be an image of old mo' and if you change your default web browser font to it you will make all 72 virgins in heaven cry.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I tried creating a font and the typeset downloaded only included the following characters:
S L A H O T E D
What words can I compose with that... dunno.
especially if you can make them really, really tiny but still 'legible' (often requiring context of nearby letters, granted). I made one - it's used in graphics and licensed by one party for print ('read the fineprint' takes on a whole new meaning when the font is baseline 3 pixels tall.)
Other than that, pixel fonts are still routinely used in games - simply because rendering a vector font is more expensive than rendering a sprite.
Due Consideration strikes again!!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
It's a little slow but, so far, it has output the following characters for me:
S e r v N o t R s p n d i g
Indeed, indeed.
There's a reason that professionally designed, usability-centered type families cost hundreds of dollars -- they take many months of careful planning, experimentation (often through scientific trials), and adjustment to bring from concept to completion.
It is no more possible to quickly design a good typeface online than it is to quickly design a good CRM system and database backend using an easy online construction kit.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Even if they had just said you can't make it here for free and then sell it for money on your own I'd feel better about that. That way my own font could remain my own.
So while it's a nice idea, couldn't they have been a little less heavy-handed about it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You make a good point. Suppose it was demanded that everything compiled under gcc had to be open-sourced? That probably wouldn't go over too well with everybody.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...or demanding fair value for their product, you cheapskate.
Who needs to create new fonts? Papyrus and Comic Sans are the only fonts we need!
This should be made into some sort of offline software. It doesn't really need to be online at all.
What about everything using the QT libraries to be open source, unless you pay them a hefty license fee? Or what about programs linking to MySQL client libraries that are required to be open source?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
But you still can't download fonts in the browser as part of an HTML document.
That used to work, back in the early days of Mozilla. Microsoft refused to put it in IE, and came up with their own, incompatible system. Mozilla then took theirs out.
. . . and illegible
Can someone direct me to an open source Comic Serif font?
Thanks!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There's a pretty fundamental difference between linking to somebody else's code, which makes it an essential part of the new work, and using a tool to produce something that stands alone.
It's that difference that lets TrollTech and Oracle/MySQL dictate licensing terms when you link to their libraries, but doesn't let the creator of an IDE (or, for that matter, a text editor) automatically have a copyright claim to anything you make with it.
However, this is all sort of an irrelevant point. The way FontStruct is going to enforce its restriction isn't just through copyright law, it's almost certainly going to be through simple contracts. If you want to use the tool, you'll need to agree to the terms, and one of the terms will be that you give permission to FontStruct to keep a copy of the finished product under a free license.
Independent of any copyright concerns I think that contract ought to stand just fine. Since it's not being presented after the time of sale, it avoids the 'clickthru' issue (where by the time you get to the agreement, you've already purchased and opened the software, meaning you can't return it), and there's pretty clear "consideration" involved: you agree to the terms, and you get to use the software as a result. None of that seems any more egregious than a lot of other contracts that are deemed enforceable every day.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
holy shit, is that informative or what!
I too thought of mentioning "Helvetica", it is a great movie indeed.
You might also want to check out the music of the band "El Ten Eleven", many of their songs were used in that movie.
The saddest poem