Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Furthermore, creating a typeface that is actually in this day and age when the Internet goes beyond North America and Western European countries requires wide Unicode coverage, but I imagine (I haven't RTFA) that the people toying around with this are producing only ASCII/Basic Latin fonts, exactly what we don't need.
Who is "we"?...
You just typed out about 50 words using what you "don't need"...
Granted, nothing ground breaking as far as font creation goes is going to come of this website... but if anyone is serious about making typography isn't going to be using some web-based font creating tool... as the original/first poster said, this is great for younger people/inexperienced users as an introduction to typography...
Besides, since the actual site is slashdotted (at this moment) maybe it can handle more advanced typesets... I watched the little video, and I was impressed that it wasn't just 1-0, A-Z, a-z but what seemed to be the full set...
However, I do find this sort of disturbing, or "cheap" because it desregards the hundreds (thousands?) of years that have gone into designing fonts... and that it is still rather limited until its vector-based...
As a side note: http://www.helveticafilm.com/ is an interesting documentary on the history of a single font (at least i found it interesting)
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.
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."
Which is why I hate graphic designers. They put the shiny above the usable.
Not that you don't need them, or that they don't do good work, but a lot of design should be boring. "I got bored" is not a good reason to use one font rather than another.
Graphic designers do a job. If they want to create art, that's something they can do on their own time.
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.