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)
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.
What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
How similar... (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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.
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.
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.
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: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:What's the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
I really hope at least two of them are near-complete set of unicode/utf-8 fonts
That'd be great!
and maybe an application oriented to the creation of vectorized fonts for linux would be cool too, but thats another slightly related story
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:Why aren't there more good Free fonts already? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Not Quark... InDesign on Linux :) (Score:2, Interesting)
Port you apps to Linux Adobe, and I'll be a loyal customer for life
.:diatonic:.
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.
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.
One Typeface - many fonts (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, one particular typeface such as Optima, may have many fonts such as a bold font, italic etc. In fact many type foundries have their own versions of a particular typeface. TrueType and OpenType can compile these into one font file (just to make things more confusing).
So my point is this: While bitsream is licensing ten fonts, it is really only one family. There does seem to be both serif and sans serif versions, so it will probably feel like two or three quite different typefaces.
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.