Scalable-Font Tools? 16
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 (Score:1, Troll)
Re:True Type (Score:3, Insightful)
True true (Score:1)
The font, not the technology (Score:1)
Chris
MS core fonts are free for noncommercial use (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MS core fonts are free for noncommercial use (Score:2)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
http://dreamer.nitro.dk/linux/lfp/index.html [nitro.dk]
Of course I've been wrong before...
What's the question again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's the question again? (Score:1, Insightful)
web fonts (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:web fonts (Score:2)
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.