Open Fonts For The Web -- Harder Than It Sounds 179
simpl3x writes "of the nytimes articles posted today, this one about new, open fonts designed for the web was by far the most interesting. Here is a link to the project site, and here is a reason why it is necessary. For all the talk of the world wide part, the basics are still very local, aren't they? It will be interesting to see how one chooses a character on a keyboard!"
Truth be told... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/ [nongnu.org]
Font Copyright.... (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, font making people have tried to claim that their fonts are 'software' and thus copyrightable. But if you made a duplicate font 'by hand' it would be legal... but you would have to call it something else, as 'times new roman' and 'verdana' are trademarks of various font providers.
Another ramification of this is that you can get really cheap fonts for your computer that look exactly the same as some of the most expensive ones.
Standardization... (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, the methodology for creating the paper depended sharply on the ultimate destination (or publication). Every publisher has their own requirements for typeset, etc. Really you need to convince publishers to agree to accept the font package before it will win broad acceptance.
You can Make Websites Any Font You want.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see, the draw for open source fonts, however. I think the reasoning behind this is that it will allow people to create works, using whatever open source font they want, and not have to worry about paying someone for it. just my Humble opinion... I could be wrong...
Ups and Downs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Font Copyright.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Different char encodings need different fonts (Score:3, Interesting)
I know this is a little bit off topic, but think about all the kids/adults kids in India (or any non-ISO-8859-1 country) being unable to use certain apps or even operating systems because key aspects cannot be localized.
Isn't it very simple? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unknown languages that no one speaks. (Score:2, Interesting)
Pah, forget these ''math'' fonts... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://fonts.tom7.com/ [tom7.com]
Trust me. Instant PhD.
Hmmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got latex2e class files for both of those formats, which includes how the fonts should be layed out, figures, bibliography, page numbers, equations, and pretty much everything else.
I also have one from my University and past university for their thesis formats (at the Undergrad, Grad, and pHD levels for each).
Publishers just need to get everyone to accept metadata for how they want things to look; changing look and feel and fonts should be easy as long as you're using a WYSIWYM package.
I don't even know now what they wanted; all I know is that I had to edit one line to make my paper look the way they wanted it to.
Re:Pah, forget these ''math'' fonts... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it would be pretty boring. I've done it a little bit for a class I took a few years ago, and it was really not very fun. My feeling is that we have enough corporate-looking fonts already, and that it's much more fun and interesting to push the envelope on new font looks, as well as extend the corporate fonts to cover more of the Unicode charset. I would be interested in a push to create free (as in freedom) corporate fonts to replace existing ones, but it really is a pain in the ass so there'd need to be a good chance of the project producing something worthwhile
I do like to make usable bitmap fonts, though, and I've done some of that.