[Openfontlibrary] droid fonts

[Christopher Fynn]

Dave Crossland wrote:

> On 15/11/2007, Christopher Fynn <cfynn at gmx.net> wrote:
>> In this case I'd wait till you read the actual licence in the fonts.
> 
> Yes; lots of chatter about how much freedom Google is giving with
> these phones, since what is available now is totally proprietary. But
> I hope they will release it under Apache 2. (GPLv3 compatible :-)
> 
>> Ascender is not particularly in the Free and OpenSource fonts camp...
>> They are also the marketing agents for Microsoft(R) fonts.
> 
> Yes, this is true, but they did Red Hat's Liberation fonts too, so
> they are more in the sofware-freedom camp then any other proprietary
> foundry, afaik

Hi Dave

I suspect Red Hat paid Bill Davis / Ascender for the Liberation fonts - and 
Google has probably paid them for the Droid fonts too. If Google commissioned 
the Droid fonts then the choice of license will of course be theirs and, if the 
licence for those fonts is open, the credit for that should probably go to them 
not to Ascender.

Ascender's "web fonts survey" used an incredibly biased set of "tests"

<< 1. "TrueType hinting tables – 8.9% failed (404 TrueType fonts had 
improper/incomplete tables*)"

"This test checks for the presence of ‘fpgm’, ‘prep’, and ‘cvt’ tables. If all 
three tables are present the font passes, if any or all are missing the font 
fails this test. The consequence of a failure is that the font will be flagged 
as having errors in FontBook under Mac OS X 10.4.">>

- I suspect most of the font tested were created long before FontBook on Mac OS 
X 10.4 came out. To pass this even unhinted fonts need these tables even if they 
contain no useful data. Anyway I understand this has been fixed in Mac OSX 10.5


- The statement "Fonts that have hinting information will have better screen 
quality in Windows than a font with no hinting information." is imho not always 
true - With TrueType fonts bad hinting instructions or poor quality "auto 
hinting" may be worse than no hinting at all. I've noticed the on-the-fly auto 
hinting in FreeType often renders even many commercial fonts better than when 
the hinting instructions in the font are applied.


<<"Code Page 1252 character set – 80.8% failed (3696 fonts missing one or more 
characters)">>
<<"Mac Roman character set – 95.9% failed (4385 fonts missing one or more 
characters)>>

- Without looking at the details of which particular characters are missing 
these figures are not very significant.

- If the missing characters are not used or very rarely used on web pages how 
significant is their absence?. I'm thinking about things like mu (B5) cedilla 
(B8) in the "Windows ANSI" 1253 code page, "approxequal" (C5) and Delta (C6) in 
"Mac Roman".

- For English language only web sites in most cases you could drop many other 
non ASCII characters in these code pages. (This is just what sub-setting in 
embedded fonts does.)

- All Adobe's fonts which used the "Adobe character set" would also fail this test.

- Thinking beyond these two code pages there are of course examples of high 
quality free fonts like Gentium which has far better character coverage than 
almost any commercial font.

Also how many of the tested free fonts were symbol fonts or similar?

<<"Trademark string – 1.7% failed (78 fonts missing a trademark string">>

- If the font name or foundry name is not a registered trademark why should the 
Trademark string field contain any data?

<< "Embedding restriction – 30.3% failed (1386 fonts set to “Restricted” or 
improper fsType)">>

- My guess  an equally large percentage of commercial fonts would be set to 
"Restricted" or have some limitations on embedding

Anyway the Ascender survey at least makes the point that we should strive for 
*quality* in free and open source fonts.

Perhaps the OpenFont library could perform a very useful service to users by 
setting some kind of real standard indicating the quality of fonts and pointing 
out technical faults. Maybe some kind of "seal of approval" for truly high 
quality free fonts conducted by design professionals? Objective comparisons 
between particular free fonts and similar fonts from commercial foundry might 
also be useful. This would perhaps give free fonts more credibility and be an 
answer to the kind of "survey" Ascender made. The current "ratings" and 
"reviews" in the OpenFont library are nice but imo pretty subjective.

- Chris