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.
For publicity? (Score:1, Insightful)
GNOME already looks great out of the box (Score:1, Insightful)
They obviously haven't tried RH8.0
Not that I'm complaining... the more fonts the better!!!
Daniel
this is cool... (Score:3, Insightful)
Graphic design, its not just for the Mac any more
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.
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:For publicity? (Score:3, Insightful)
Who care's. We have them either way.
Re:It's only 10 fonts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What I don't understand. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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: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: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: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:Show us your Bits!(tream fonts) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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: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: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. =)
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: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.
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.
Linux gets fonts? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why aren't there more good Free fonts already? (Score:2, Insightful)
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:3, Insightful)
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
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.