Scalable-Font Tools?

DarkVein writes "My question is twofold. First, with the introduction of WebFonts from W3C, are there any projects underway to develop a real Web Font format, or are Type1 and Truetype thought to be sufficient? Secondly, I seem to be at a loss to find any decent and open font creation tools, especially ones capable of Unicode. The best I've found is GETO which seems to have been abandoned about a year and a half ago, without notice. I've had a long standing desire to get my feet wet designing one or two decent Unicode fonts, but most of the options seem to only be available for MacOS9, Win32 and require far higher prices."

True Type

[FreeLinux]

It seems that everyone has become satisfied with ripping off M$ True Type fonts. That's why no one seems particularly interested in doing much work in this area. True Types are, arguably, the best looking today and there are thousands if not millions of them.

Re:True Type

[OSSMKitty]

Actually, TrueType fonts were developed by Apple; see this TrueType history [demon.co.uk] for more information.

True true

[FreeLinux]

True Type is from Apple. But, I was referring to the practice of copying the M$ True Type fonts from a Windows machine onto Linux boxes.

The font, not the technology

[ChrisWong]

While the technology came from Apple, I think the point is that MS provided very good free TT fonts for the web. Compared to their standard web fonts pack, most anything else is junk. There is no open source equivalent anywhere near the quality of their screen-optimized fonts like Georgia or Verdana.

Chris

MS core fonts are free for noncommercial use

[coyote-san]

I hate to throw the harsh light of reality on your beliefs, but if you go to the FontPack [microsoft.com] web page and click on the FAQ link, you'll see that Microsoft explicitly states

• Anyone can download and install these fonts for their own use
• Designers can specify the fonts within their Web pages

That's black letter contract. NOBODY is ripping off Microsoft when they download the fonts from the Microsoft site for personal use. Copying them from a Windows box is a little grey, but as long as it's for personal use it doesn't violate the spirit of the license.

Unfortunately, the license does not include the right to redistribute the fonts. So a Linux distro that included the fonts would probably be in violation of this license, while a distro that provided an installer script would be fine.

Re:MS core fonts are free for noncommercial use

[smcv]

while a distro that provided an installer script would be fine. Indeed, Debian does precisely that as part of its 'contrib' archive. (As do other distros, probably)

Re:MS core fonts are free for noncommercial use

[Tet]

Unfortunately, the license does not include the right to redistribute the fonts.

Which is, of course, why they distribute them as self extracting Windows executables. The only way you can legally get them is by downloading them from Microsoft, and the only format in which they provide them is Windows only... they get to be seen to be doing the right thing by the world at large, yet at the same time, they're doing exactly what they've always done to try and enforce platform lock-in. BTW, unlike most self extracting executables, they can't simply be unpacked with unzip. Again, I can only assume that's a deliberate decision on Microsoft's part.

PfaEdit

[raulmazda]

You may want to check out PfaEdit [sourceforge.net] which is in active development.

Also along the font lines, there's also the Free Font Foundation [nitro.dk] which has some links to other font editors. Though it says that PfaEdit is "our only hope" so there's probably not anything else all that great to check out ;)

Links

[hether]

Perhaps some of the links on this page will help?
http://dreamer.nitro.dk/linux/lfp/index.html [nitro.dk]

Of course I've been wrong before...

What's the question again?

[fm6]

with the introduction of WebFonts from W3C, are there any projects underway to develop a real Web Font format, or are Type1 and Truetype thought to be sufficient?

As with so many Ask Slashdot questions, this one is frustratingly vague. What would the purpose of a web-specific font format be? You have to answer that question before you anybody can answer yours. If your answer is, "I don't know" then you've answered your own question.

Re:What's the question again?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what the original poster's wants are, but a spec that made custom fonts both legal and EFFICIENT to embed would be very, very nice!!!

web fonts

[wcb4]

Both NS and MS come out with competing formats for fonts for web pages at one time. Did this die the same horrible death as "Channels". I think MS's format used a program called WEFT to make fonts (web embedded font technology or some such) and was free. Netscape's used some technology developed by bitstream and I seem to remember the creation program being relatively expensive. Both worked quite well (at least on Mac and PC, I was not using linux at the time) What ever happened to this?

Re:web fonts

[cmowire]

MS still has fonts, Mozilla doesn't have fonts at all.

None of them work under Linux, naturally.

And it seems like nobody really really cares. The usual web set of fonts -- cartoon sans, trebuchet, verdana, arial, times, etc -- seems to be enough for most text, with graphics doing the fancy fonts. So it's good enough for most and yes, web fonts went the way of channels.