Bitstream To Donate 10 Fonts To Free Software World 410
21mhz writes "Posted on FootNotes: The GNOME Foundation and Bitstream Inc. announce long-term agreement to bring high quality fonts to Free Software. Ten fonts will be released for use under a special open license agreement, giving advanced font capabilities to all free and open source software developers and users. Read the full press release for more details." Modification and re-release (under a different name) is explicitly allowed, too.
It's only 10 fonts. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's only 10 fonts. (Score:2)
Joke. ;)
Re:It's only 10 fonts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's only 10 fonts. (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, fonts can be COPYRIGHTED!!!
Yes, you too can own a life+70 year (or 90-year corporate) monopoly, compliments of your bought-and-paid for congress critters and a cowardly Supreme Court that chooses quarterly economic expediency over constitutionality. You too can own a government entitlement to a very long-term monopoly on the very shape of the letters of the Roman alphabet.
A friend of mine does computer consultancy for law firms, among them a thug, excuse me, lawyer, who makes his living enforcing a copyright on a particlar font (I don't recall which one). How does this enforcement work? Not through the courts, as one might expect, but more in terms of a protection racket shakedown: "remove your fonts and pay us X for past violations, keep your fonts and pay us X+Y for a license of some specified term, or we'll make your defense cost more than your net worth."
Copyright AND patents are destroying the freedom of information exchange, and will likely obliterate it within our lifetimes unless some serious reform is undertaken, something that does not appear too likely in todays political climate, which has recently come to resemble corporate fascism more than even a semblance of democracy...but that is a discussion for another day.
In other words, the licensing terms and term are important, and if this proves as benevolent as it first appears, this is a very, very good thing for free software.
copyright (Score:3, Informative)
No they can't, not in the US anyway.
typeright.org [typeright.org]: "The US Copyright Office still officially refuses to accord protection for typeface designs."
There are licensing and trademark issues, but not copyright. As the poster said, the lawyer works on intimidation, not actually getting judgements. (Unless the DMCA has radically changed this, which is possible as it seems to have all kinds of unintended consequences.)
Re:It's only 10 fonts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, no license today really addresses fonts; open source licenses tend to make provisions for source code and computer programs, or else "open content", e.g., printed words. It would kind of seem natural to craft a new license that addresses font issues.
this is cool... (Score:3, Insightful)
Graphic design, its not just for the Mac any more
free fonts (Score:3, Funny)
Re:free fonts (Score:3, Funny)
Yes! (Score:3, Funny)
It's always good to hear news like this.. companies don't need to open source everything.. just donate a little to the community and it'll fill our hearts with warm feelings.
Most of us (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, I'm glad that Bitstream is a good enough community player to donate these. Only problem is our community is served a whole lot more by quality than it is by quantity.
Re:Most of us (Score:3, Insightful)
Possibly not legally, and definately not Free. Some fonts that ship with MS Office are explicitly for use with MS Office, etc. They do have a free (cost) pack of fonts for use in alternate web browsers, but whether or not it's OK to use them for linux I'm not sure (I know Redhat doesn't enable them by default). I'm not positive, but I think there's something about them being free for use only to liscensees of windows. All of which is MS's perogative, since they are their fonts.
Anyways, some Free (libre) fonts, if indeed they are *usable* and not garbage like 'Carebearz' or 'Stoner handwriting', make linux just a little bit more legitimate on the desktop than it did an hour ago. It still has lightyears to go, however.
Re:Most of us (Score:4, Interesting)
1) copy c:\windows\fonts\*.ttf into (say)
2) get ttmkfdir (search freshmeat) and do ttmkfdir > fonts.dir; cp fonts.dir fonts.scale
3) add the line FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/ttf" to the files section of
4) restart X
5) if it's Profit!!! then I'm missing out on something.
You know you're a geek (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutely! (Score:4, Funny)
No kidding.
Of course, if I were posting this from a Linux machine, I wouldn't be excited, because I wouldn't be able to fucking read the story.
10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. (Score:5, Insightful)
The microsoft world does very well with ARIAL, COURIER, and TIMES NEW ROMAN.
(Actually, most of the personal computing world does fairly well with these fonts)
I used CHICAGO, TIMES and BOOKMAN exclusively for years on a Mac LCII.
The crux of the issue is that these should be high quality fonts. THAT is a big deal. Kerning is a huge pain.
"ae" vs "lk" vs "ld" vs "dl" vs "kl" -- spacing changes more than you think. Amen, hallelujah...now lets just see how they look.
Depends on how they / you define font. (Score:2)
Also, it might be 10 versions of Symbol...
Re:10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, and according to Fontilus Bitstream were the people who made these fonts.
I think people don't realise how hard it is to make good fonts. Arial is a huge project in and of itself, simply getting the fonts looking good at all sizes is hard, and then you need glyphs for other languages and alphabets.
It's hard. 10 fonts is an amazing gift, if they are of high quality. I think they will be, Bitstream are good.
Re:10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. (Score:3, Informative)
You are - Monotype also made times new roman, and courier - at least on my XP and 2000 machine they did.
Re:10 fonts /IS/ a big deal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Months ago another font article was written about MS pulling their fonts from their site. The
10 Fonts (not typefaces, fonts - there is a difference) that are properly designed can take years to produce. There is no science behind fonts, its an art. Its something type designers take very seriously and its a whole different geek culture. Sure we have Arial, Courier, Helvetica, but one typeface is not good in all cases. Think about how many different typefaces you have seen in Newspapers, TV, Film, etc. For each their own purpose. If people can learn to apply the styles of good typography to their projects then we all benefit through better legibility, readability, and aesthetic means.
Personally, I really hope one of the fonts is Stone.
What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
BitStream is donating high-quality AND Free fonts here! So soon we will get Linux distros with high-quality fonts out-of-the-box.
Re:What's the point? (Score:2)
Since these are being released to the public *EVERY* OS will have access to these fonts.
Open source != linux
I will be able to enjoy these on XP, Linux, MacOSX and whatever else i plug them into.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
And yes, it _is_ a big deal. Slapping together a half-decent font able to show the 7-bit ascii characters in a few sizes isn't all that much work. Making a high-quality, well designed font that will work over the entire iso8859-1 (or even Unicode) with proper hinting and good visibility over a large range of sizes and resolutions, takes a _lot_ of time and effort.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lousy font rendering/choice is one of the last major hurdles in Linux desktop adoption. It stymied me until last year, when Redhat 8 made the Linux desktop viewable without me wanting to chunder.
Yes, you are missing the point.
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
If these fonts feature a complete character set and are as high quality as anything you get from a fresh install of windows (except that ugly Comic Sans) and macOS, then we're in luck.
Show a screenshot for some Linux program for a windows only user and the first thing he'll notice is that the fonts are ugly, if it's not a RH8.0 linux system. The font rendering in RH8 is very good.
Now if only I didn't have to install the fonts all over the place for GTK1, GTK2, QT, TCL/TK and all the other toolkits so they can see the same fonts....
Re:What's the point? (Score:2)
I'm no expert on fonts but I do know a little about the difficulties in creating them. I'm sure someone will correct me if I mispeak on a minor point.
Sure, you can download free cheeseball fonts from lots of different free font sites but there is a *huge* difference between those free fonts you just downloaded and professionally made fonts. Why do you think Linux has gone so long without a decent set of fonts? Its because high quality fonts take a *long* time to develop and are *very* expensive to make because of all the labor involved. It can take a professional typeographer a full year to develop just one font. Until now its been very difficult for the Free Software community to find either:
1) A professional typeographer willing to donate a large amount of time (typeographers and professional level font creation software doesn't grow on trees)
2) A company willing to fund the creation of the fonts. (expensive!)
With this in mind I think one can begin to appreciate the magnitude of the gift that Bitstream is giving the community.
Thank you Bitstream!
The best thing would be: (Score:4, Insightful)
Sets of fonts that are the exact same size as the
standard Microsoft fonts (e.g. Arial). This is
one of the key problems when trying to export
files from Open Office to an MS Word user - the
fonts end up not matching correctly and things
look funny.
My $.02.
Re:The best thing would be: (Score:2)
Hehe... (Score:4, Funny)
Then they release ten variations of webdings.. the press release says "Try rendering your pages using THOSE on Mozilla!"
Good News for Mozilla and Web Browsing (Score:2, Interesting)
Now if only we could see these fonts... There's no match for Vera on the Bitstream font search.
Also check out Thunderhawk! (Score:2)
Kaching! Finally something decent looking for PocketPC users who're sick of the joke that's portable IE!
Re:Also check out Thunderhawk! (Score:2)
Availability
ThunderHawk is available at an annual subscription rate of $49.95. But with a 30-day free trial, why not take it out for a test drive?
How similar... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How similar... (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm... Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New already have high-quality equivalents in OSS world: Times, Helvetica and Courier. There versions that come with XFree86 are crap, but there are high-quality Type1 versions of them available, made by URW. You can get them from the GIMP web page [gimp.org].
Okay, I'm not a typographer (just play one on Slashdot), so I think those just look good enough. =)
And the fonts are... (Score:4, Funny)
1. Helvetica WayTooNarrow
2. Jesse Ventura Bold
3. Another Godamnned Star Trek Font
4. Cthulhu HyperItalic
5. Penis Extra Small
6. Fertilizus Dungbats
7. Douche Medium
8. Bush Wacky Wingdings
9. MS AntiTrust
10. End Times Extra Dark
You got one wrong: (Score:2, Funny)
Will it become 20 fonts (Score:5, Funny)
Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) (Score:5, Informative)
http://tieguy.org/fonts.png
Pretty decent stuff, in my opinion.
Re:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) (Score:2)
OTOH, I've had situations where a font looks awful on the screen, and great on the page (i.e Bookman on Solaris under StarOffice).
Re:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but you should take heart that this is just what the first guy who just punched text into AbiWord on his notebook got. We will see better.
I mean, right now you'd have to think that there are hints not being used here, or being used in a particularly sucky^H^H^Hboptimal fashion. So the "ts" problem you note is much worse in Vera Serif 16 than in the 24.
What gives me great hope is the look of the Vera Mono Sans font. Now, there's a font, people. Before you pick apart the licensing or whine about not getting Centaur or what not, have a look at this. I, I, might even have to end my love affair with Lucida Sans Typewriter (sniff).
Re:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, actually it looks like no kerning at all. Kerning is usually a function of the application, not the OS. Word, for instance, in different versions had working or broken pair kerning. That's one reason you use a DTP app (Ventura, Pagemaker, etc) instead of a word processor.
Re:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, the notion of a "Bitstream Vera" font is rather obscure on the net according to google. There *is* a set of multilingual fonts that go under the "Vera Humana" name; maybe Bitstream bought or adapted these? So where are the font experts when you need them? :-)
Re:Ugh, horrible (Score:3, Informative)
Linux apps will keep sucking as long as each and every app does font rendering its own goddamned way. The app should tell the server what fucking text to render and where, and the server should anti-alias it and render it, and we should toss out the old apps that use the antiquated X rendering system to draw glyphs in the X client. Then just focus on making Xft/FreeType rock.
Horrible rumor (Score:3, Funny)
Psst -- LCD users... (Score:5, Informative)
If you're running XFree86 4 and Xft as your font manager, add this to your XftConfig:
match edit rgba = rgb; (some esoteric LCDs may need "bgr" instead.)
Sub-pixel font rendering! Yes, it has a little visible color artifacting, but it gives you the same wonderful effect that you get with Windows XP ClearType and Mac Jaguar sub-pixel rendering.
On my Viewsonic vp201mb, I can see fonts beautifully a couple point sizes smaller than I can see them with antialiasing alone.
Re:Psst -- LCD users... (Score:5, Informative)
Enabling sub-pixel rendering on Trinitron-esque monitors also seems to work out well as they use a regular rectangular pixel layout, similar to LCD panels. I didn't expect it to work because CRTs don't have the same 1:1 relationship that LCDs have when running at their native resolution, but...
--
Re:Psst -- LCD users... (Score:3, Informative)
Such a giving company! (Score:2)
Double Good (Score:4, Insightful)
While the main story here is Bitstream's magnanmous gesture to the open source community, I could not help but notice Jim Gettys comments that showed how he viewed the action as important, too, to KDE, despite being on the GNOME board.
I like to see the 2 desktop projects recognize their mutual needs and their mutual strengths.And I'm hoping that someday there will be a bridge between Bonobo and KParts, too.
And yet (Score:2)
Other free (as in freedom and as in beer) fonts (Score:2, Informative)
I have released a set of fonts under the GPL (10 or so) my latest "Dustismo" is a good all purpose sans serif, with more then 350 glyphs. get them all at http://www.cheapskatefonts.com/
Thanks,
Dustin
Missing Fonts for linux. (Score:2, Interesting)
Many production X Window software seem to use these 2 fonts, and xfree doesnt include them. No loss, but I see the error all the time, on many applications. (Do a google search, it is a common problem)
aka..
Font specified in font.properties not found [-b&h-lucida sans-medium-r-normal-sans-*-%d-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1]
Font specified in font.properties not found [-urw-itc zapfdingbats-medium-r-normal--*-%d-*-*-p-*-sun-fo
How many glyphs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Could Apple donate TTF's in return for KHTML? (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple seems to have benefitted from the free software community by utilizing KHTML for it's new browser. Could it return the favor by donating some of it's TTF's for use in Linux/Xfree?
Re:Could Apple donate TTF's in return for KHTML? (Score:5, Interesting)
Other than the fact that Apple have released very little stuff they developed themselves, they'd have been better off giving FreeType an unlimited license to TrueType hinting, instead of forcing them to develop an auto-hinter. It wouldn't have even cost anything, I don't know how much they make out of these royalties but I doubt it's much. Yet they do not.
Apple not going to be very nice on this point (Score:3, Insightful)
Almost certainly little or nothing. MS already has an unlimited license. However, it has a good deal of worth to Apple in that it adds value to their system in the publishing field -- higher quality font rendering. It's a lovely barrier to entry, and gives Apple an excellent leg up over its competitors (BSD, Linux, etc). I doubt Apple will be giving out licenses any time soon.
STIX Fonts (Score:5, Informative)
The STIX [stixfonts.org] fonts are going to cover all of Unicode.
Maybe I'll never again see "?" for every non-ASCII character. Now, *that* will be useful.
From their site:
The STIX mission will be fully realized when:
* Fully hinted PostScript Type 1 and OpenType font sets have been created.
* All characters/glyphs have been incorporated into Unicode representation or comparable representation and browsers include program logic to fully utilize the STIX font set in the electronic representation of scholarly scientific documents.
Vera Font Family (Score:3, Informative)
The 10 fonts are all from the same family "Vera". Hopefully they look good enough on the screen and on paper that people won't mind using them.
There are at three major styles "Serif", "Sans" and "Mono", with three minor styles "regular", "italic" and "bold". Thats 9 fonts. I would guess the 10th is a set of symbols.
I haven't been able to find samples of the family on either bitstreams site or myFonts.com so I would also guess that the font is renamed for copyright purposes from something else.
Fonts and copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a movement underfoot called TypeRight [typeright.org] advocating copyright protection for fonts. The site also explains some of the copyright issues.
It interesting that the lack of copyright protection has apparently not hindered the creation of a wide variety of fonts.
Be careful how you say things (Score:4, Informative)
It seems to be little-known fact that fonts and typefaces are not protected by copyright.
That's because this is not quite correct. You should read the site you link to more closely.
There are two separate areas of copyright on a computer font, relating to the design (the shape of the letters), and the vector data - and name - that describes this design.
In the US, the design of a typeface cannot be copyrighted, but the data and name that describes this design can be. Thus, for instance, Monotype can claim copyright over their implementation of Arial, so if you simply copy the .ttf font file without their permission, you are in breach of copyright law. However, if you print out each character of the font extra-large and then scan and trace the shapes to make a new font with a different name, you are okay - in the process of tracing the shape, you have created an original work. This is why there are so many cheap knock-offs of popular typefaces with subtly different names to the original. Funnily enough given the nature of this story, Bitstream are notorious for doing this.
I don't think your idea of creating bitmaps from a scalable font to avoid copyright would pass muster, because you have merely translated the copyrighted data from one form to another - no different to converting the font from TrueType to Type1, for instance. You haven't created an original work.
Note that this rather strange situation only applies to the US - just about everywhere else that enforces copyright allows designers to copyright typeface designs as well as the data that describes the design, so if you make a knock-off of a non-US designer's typeface, you might find yourself in hot water.
Interestingly, the situation dates from the early years of American independence when all the commonly-used typeface designs were owned by foreigners and there was a shortage of skilled typographers to create distinctive American typefaces. To get around this problem, the fledgling US Patent Office simply declared typeface designs uncopyrightable, thus sparing US printers some stiff royalties. Ahhh the irony...
It interesting that the lack of copyright protection has apparently not hindered the creation of a wide variety of fonts.
True, but it should be noted that almost all the important typefaces of the last 200 years have been designed outside of the US... Times, Helvetica, Gill Sans, Futura, Eurostile, Rotis, Palatino, these typefaces are the backbone of modern design, and none of them came from the US.
Screenshot (Score:5, Funny)
T h 3 Qu 1ck Br0 wn F0x Ju m ps 0v 3r T h 3 L4zy Do9!
About time!! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is excellent news, indeed.
Good fonts are (a) very hard to design,
(b) rare, (c) expensive and (d) tremendously
important for the feeling of your desktop.
No matter what you say, it takes a special
kind of artistic ability to make good fonts.
This news is much more important than a 10%
speedup or a "new gadget" type of feature.
P.
P.S. Also note, that a "full" font includes
italics, bold, small capitals and quite a few
symbols. Many free fonts are incomplete in
that respect.
Why aren't there more good Free fonts already? (Score:4, Insightful)
At the very least, why doesn't someone like Red Hat or even IBM hire a top-notch font designer and have him/her just make a few? How long does it take someone with good skills to make a good, basic font? A year? Six months? Two years?
Re:Why aren't there more good Free fonts already? (Score:5, Informative)
But Your Mileage May Vary, and it's been awhile since I've actually made a font (1993 was the last time I went throught the complete process).
If you want a complete Unicode font, well, then all bets are off, since those can be huge.
Nice gesture, one niggle (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a very nice gesture by Bitstream. The one thing I don't like is the constant harping in the press release that this will finally make Linux look good.
Of course, the Gnome Foundation can hardly say anything else, as they would otherwise ruin the good PR for Bitstream, but frankly, I don't think anything is wrong with the fonts right now, with the exception of distros picking dumb defaults, and idiots with a two-day course in using Frontpage building websites. Try surfing the web with 'Use own fonts' on in Galeon, and then viewing the same pages with the specified fonts. If you want a headache, that'll give it to you (sadly, Open Source oriented sites are not free of this evil neither. On default settings NewsForge is unreadable because it picks a sans-serif font in small type, a typographical no-no if there ever was one for a site where the information is supposed to be primarily textual).
After picking the right fonts, I have never felt the need for anti-aliased fonts on my desktop. My text is clear and sharp at 1280x1024, and even my laptop at 1024x768 on 14.4inch screen looks fairly good. Certainly nothing like the headache-inducing nightmare some of the people on this thread want us to believe.
Of course, that I get a nice desktop look with using Adobe fonts for all my settings just proves the point I made in the second paragraph. And the fact that these fonts come standard with X reinforces it.
Still, a big thank you to Bitstream is in order. Whatever the motives, this was a good thing.
MartWhat about Adobe PDF Base fonts? (Score:5, Interesting)
But I am still anxiously awaiting Adobe to release free versions of their Base PDF fonts. Adobe always makes a big deal about the PDF format being "open" (albeit completely controlled by them). But the one MAJOR non-open component of PDF are the non-open base fonts! Sure the font metrics, aka AFM files, are free (but they hide them very well in the bowels of their ftp site), but not the font outlines.
Come on Adobe, please follow Bitstream's lead and release your base PDF fonts! You can't claim PDF is open until you release the fonts. (Perhaps the same goes for Postscript which has a larger set of Base/Mandatory fonts?)
Re:What about Adobe PDF Base fonts? (Score:3, Informative)
Some information/clarification about the agreement (Score:5, Informative)
1) We hope a preliminary version of the fonts will be available next week for download, but no redistribution. They still need some work; consider this a beta test.
2) We hope finished fonts will be available in a month or so, after Jim Lyles (the font designer) has finished them up. We need a few changes: the font family Vera is derived from (Prima) has "0" and "O" too hard to distinguish, and similarly for "1" and "l", given our often technical audience.
There is also some work on hinting, etc, to finish up.
When finished, they will go under a copyright which allows you (roughly) to fold, spindle, and mutilate the fonts, so long as you change the name to something else, and you can sell them so long as you don't sell them by themselves. You can sell them with any software whatsoever. You can freely redistribute the fonts anywhere, anytime, unmodified under that name.
The sale provision is that Bitstream does not want other font vendors to just drop the fonts into their font sale mechanisms and sell them, something they are giving away.
I can't say I blame them.
3) the coverage of these fonts is roughly western european; there is the possibility of some fonts in the future with wider coverage, but as that those fonts are not yet complete, I don't want to say much more, as their availability is much less certain.
4) You can get a good idea of what the fonts look like and what the coverage is by the following URL (once the slashdot effect allows Bitstream to recover).
http://store.bitstream.com/searchresults.asp?se
Now you know where the name Vera comes from
5) the agreement also covers potentially adding characters to the family under the Bitstream Vera name, but Bitstream (and Gnome) reserve the right to approve the additions: we want to *know* when we open fonts of these names that we have what we expect. Feel free to hack to your hearts content under other names, however.
Re:Some information/clarification about the agreem (Score:3, Interesting)
>There is also some work on hinting, etc, to finish up.
It's good to know we'll be getting a set of manually hinted fonts. But what about those of us (possibly the majority?) who have TrueType bytecode hinting disabled in our FreeType builds? Do these glyphs render well when hinted with FreeType's autohinter?
It would be a shame for the fonts to work well only when the patented bytecode interpretter is enabled in FreeType...
Re:Some information/clarification about the agreem (Score:5, Interesting)
And Linux is even more important/likely to get to serious volume in parts of the world where the TrueType patents do not apply: they are only US and Britain.
Good looking fonts=More Ex-Windows Users. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think alot a potential users are turned off by the sloppy appearance of Linux on the screen.
This is but one step in the direction of having Linux more accepted on the desktop. Redhat understands this. That is why Bluecurve was created. It still isn't good enough but it is better. If Openoffice and Mozilla out of the box can use these new fonts then you might have something to kill Windows with.
Just my worthless
Re:thank god! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:thank god! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:thank god! (Score:3, Informative)
The current Slackware has them too. So does Mozilla, but you have to compile it with --enable-xft (IIRC), but check out fixes here [packetwarriors.net].
fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:5, Funny)
Linus is not very good at displaying the fonts
I don't think you can directly blame him :)
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand, Bill isn't too good at this, either.
(Just making fun of my own typo.)
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:5, Insightful)
The big difference, In Windows any application will use AA fonts by default. In Linux, your application needs to have AA compiled in via a supported method. Gentoo does this better, as its a source based distro, you configure it yourself. Redhat has to precompile the source with AA enable (via its supported methods).
Lots of dependencies on Linux, makes it is much more difficult to enable and use AA fonts. Also helps if you know what methods to enable, and configurations. (I dont have them, do you? Is your method the best? Is it a hack? Was it the correct supported procedure? Did it break anything?) Ugh. Good job for Redhat for trying to make it easy for the average/newbie linux user.
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:3)
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you could just look at the result, DUH!.
If for some reason you think the theory is more important than the result, read the source code.
TWW
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:5, Interesting)
As a caveat, some people always hate antialising. Even in Windows they dive right for the "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts" checkbox. All programs that antialias should include a simple method for disabling it, or you are going to annoy some of your users.
Re:screen fonts should not use anti-aliasing (Score:2, Interesting)
Joel on Software for the complete argument: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/art
Re:fonts types vs anti-aliasing (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you meant 8 pixels? Either way, that's absolutely the domain where hinting is most useful.
Simon
Re:thank god! (Score:2)
On the other hand, since RedHat 8 finally features font rendering that doesn't suck, they may have a shot at whooping Redmond upside the head on the desktop -- but ONLY if they tone down installation so that it doesn't ask you about PPP connectivity, give you eight (or however many) terminal emulator apps to select among, and similar things that drive non-uber-nerds nutty.
Re:thank god! (Score:2, Informative)
But as everything nowadays, the developers are having patent issues. The deal is that in order to have nice looking fonts (at least with the current fonts that are available) you have to use the BCI (Byte Code Interpreter), wich is patented, so many distros do not distribute freetype compiled with the BCI turned on (some distros don't care about it and turn the BCI on anyway, I assume this is what happens with redhat). And even when BCI is turned on, some distros really do a lousy job when configuring the fonts.
I have mozilla running with fonts exactly like they look in windows (i did compare the fonts using vmware and they really are exactly the same) but I did have to configure many things. If you are willing to do this too check the Gentoo Forums [gentoo.org]. Unlike what happens on other Linux distros comunities, the gentoo users don't give up until they've got it like they want (and don't mind sharing their work), so you'll probably won't have a hard time getting help in the gentoo community.
Re:thank god! (Score:3, Informative)
Try installing the XFT version of Mozilla [mozilla.org]
It's very easy to install, and looks amazing! It pains me to use any other browser on any platform. And I used to *hate* Mozilla's fonts.
Re:thank god! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What I don't understand. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What I don't understand. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For publicity? (Score:3, Insightful)
Who care's. We have them either way.
Ideology (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it's because of similar ideology.
"Setting the standard for excellence in font technology, Bitstream
holds numerous key patents in the U.S. that cover the
creation of portable fonts for the Internet. Building
on this experience, Bitstream has released
ThunderHawk, a breakthrough technology for the
wireless Web."
Not a big deal right now, but I see friction in the upcoming years as more people come in contact with the Open Source world and cultures clash -- the current corporate view of intellectual property and legal systems for supporting it in the United States don't fit very well with it...
Ah, well. I shouldn't be such a downer right after such a good event. Thank you, Bitstream!
Re:GNOME already looks great out of the box (Score:2)
Fonts really put the polish on RH8.
Re:Give a man a fish... (Score:3, Informative)
pfaedit? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to say that what Linux really needs is a free top-notch vector font editor, something along the lines of Fontographer.
You mean, like pfaedit? [sourceforge.net] It's almost a carbon copy of Fontographer, and very good it is for editing fonts too.
The tools (pfaedit) have been usable for about 18 months though, but still no-one is having a serious go at fixing fonts. I don't think people realise just how much time and effort goes into a font. My day job is as a graphic designer, I draw things all day, mostly using vector graphics, so I like to think I have a handle on what I'm doing and I can draw with curves quicker than most. In a past life I put together a couple of typefaces for a corporate client, and this is from my experience of that (I used Fontographer to begin with, then switched to Fontlab later on because Fontographer can't do TrueType hinting worth a damn - I do wish pfaedit had cloned Fontlab).
To go from nothing but an idea to a set of outlines covering iso-8859-1, that's about 4-5 days of solid full-time work - for a fairly simple sans-serif font in regular weight - add another day each for bold, italic and bold italic, add some more on if it's a more complicated style of typeface. Getting the kerning (spacing between characters) right is another couple of days work if you want it perfect.
Then, the nightmare part - hinting. Hinting... let's just say it's about as fun as pulling teeth without anaesthetic. To get good results on-screen, you need to allow about 2-3 hours - per character. If you want it to work correctly on more than one platform, double that. Fortunately lots of characters in the iso-8859-1 set are compound, formed of a letter and various accents and so forth, so you can just copy and paste these, but still you can easily end up spending several weeks on it - and it's the most unrewarding, boring and soul-destroying work I've ever done. Then repeat for bold, italic and bold italic.
It's all very well saying that people will re-hint dodgy fonts for fun, but you try it and see how long you last before giving up and going back to something rewarding, like writing an IRC client or GIMPing together a new wallpaper. I hope FreeType's autohinter everntually gets good enough that we can just give up on hinting.