[Openfontlibrary] FOSS and the Commercial Print World

[Liam R E Quin]

On Sat, 2007-27-01 at 12:08 -0800, Raph Levien wrote:

[...]

> A large part of the problem is that the vast majority of free fonts
> are in the "novelty" category. The number of original free fonts
> suitable for text that have a complete complement in all four variants
> is _very_ small (another fact which I hope will change significantly).

It took a long time for Free (libre) computer software to begin to
catch up with commercial software in terms of being useable by
people who are not computer experts or programmers.  A large
part of that was the need to provide infrastructure and vocabulary
to help people focus on users who were not programmers.

I think it will take a long time before we see significant numbers
of free (libre) fonts that are useable and have a wide glyph set.

There also are not many good business models for Type Artists
to make a living designing and giving away type right now --
people don't usually buy lucrative support contracts for fonts,
for example, although it does happen.

I say this not as discouragement, but as encouragement -- if we
don't start, we won't get anywhere.

No, the logo of the Web site doesn't matter particularly.  Giving
people a reason to go there does matter.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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