[Openfontlibrary] [Fwd: typophile thread on free fonts]

[sascha brossmann]

On 12/6/05, Laszlo <khiraly123 at gmx.net> wrote:
> * We must create free equivalents of these fonts:
> arial,

Erm, why? The only recognisable quality of this font is its
extraordinary good low-resolution hinting. >;-> In documents it may be
perfectly substituted with Helvetica and its diverse interpretations
and rip-offs. After all, Arial was designed to be substitutable for
Helvetica, thus the same applies the other way round. Even if there
were small glitches, it shouldn't matter: my experience tells me that
people who use Arial don't care about type, anyway (or sadly are
forced to care not by their company/institution).

> courier
> helvetica,
> times,

... already exist as Free[Mono|Sans|Serif], although the typographical
and technical quality of those is way below par, if not plainly
horrible. If somebody really needs a free (libre) version of fonts
which are already distributed with practically every desktop system
there is, i suggest to clean up and improve those. Nonetheless, i
think the more pressing issue is to achieve at some more *unique*
*quality* fonts in the FOSS world.

Apart from that, i am starting to sense an ethical problem here:
personally, i am clearly *opposed* to doing libre rip-offs of existing
contemporary designs (though in this case howard kettler, max
miedinger and stanley morrison are already dead - thus i would not
call their fonts contemporary anymore). I don't want a kind of freedom
that is based on an unimaginative lack of respect. Leave that kind of
sorry vampiredom to those 'publishers' with their thousands-of-fonts
clone packages, that already float around on the net in abundance.
Let's please come up with something more inspired and original. Mind,
that 'original' applies as well to digitising/(re-)interpreting type
from more or less historic specimen sheets or similar sources etc.
which i definitely don't consider to be ripping-off.

> verdana,

Wasn't Vera Sans designed as an equivalent to Verdana?

> bitstream vera (the license not allow to developpe the font under
> the same name, so there is many fork of the font, each fix some
> languages)

I don't quite understand. Wouldn't it be sufficient then, to reunite
those forks with the additional glyphs (btw, what about DejaVu)?
Personally, i don't have a problem with the obligation to fork from
the Vera family. Given the extremely high amount of sorry efforts in
the realm of free (i.e. currently mostly public domain) font design i
perfectly understand the rationale behind this policy. And, after all,
you are still free to modify the originals as you like and
redistribute your modifications. Not being able to use the original
"Vera [Sans|Sans Mono|Serif]" name imho does not interfere the least
with anybody's freedom.

> * We must document the steps of the font developping and create an
> unicode capable reference font and provide the source too (fontforge
> file)

Pardon me, but what purpose should that reference font serve?
Concerning the look, naming, index, etc. of all glyphs, there are all
the unicode tables, open references like decodeunicode.org, etc. Then,
there is already e.g. Gentium.

I *do* see the need for a good fontforge-centric tutorial on type
design and implementation, though. typeforge.net is already trying to
do something in this direction, this might be already one place to go
(and contribute if one can). The letterror wiki also has some good
resources to start with.

Concerning documentation, I would especially like to encourage to
start with tutorials on slightly easier topics than designing and
implementing a whole font from scratch, e.g.

(1) how to add glyphs to an existing font, so that they properly fit
    in (this includes non-trivial type design basics - trivia should
    be just linked, mainly in respect to micro typography, kerning
    etc., and technical issues like optimal curve construction,
    encoding, import/export, etc.).

(2) how to optimise fonts for low-resolution rendering (e.g. screen
    and standard desktop printers): hinting (truetype and ps),
    letterspacing/kerning, etc. (-> how to improve technical quality)

(3) all things unicode, open type features and the like

(4) how to design a new [bold|italic|smallcaps|...] face to be added
    to an already existing font family.

If we can get those issues settled, there should be more than enough
for people to get moving in the right directions. Whereas focusing on
creating new fonts from scratch (whether interpretation or original
does not matter) is *not* useful, imho. For one, this requires very
much resouces. Further, this is not something for people without
experience, let alone beginners. You neither start writing software by
designing and implementing an operation system, do you? ;-) We should
first get the basics right in order to build more skills and
knowledge. And - even more important - we should get more designers
interested in this stuff -- propably it would be sensible to
increasingly approach art&design colleges. One of the biggest problems
i currently see is the fatal lack of domain knowledge of all things
design in the FOSS community which i consider a major show-stopper for
spreading and improving the free desktop, with the fonts being one
part of it (let alone the gui... </me tearing gray++ hairs-- > :-/ ).

best,


sascha
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