[Clipart] OCAL identified by IBM as resource for Linux migrations

[Stephen Silver]

Jonadab wrote:

> you will probably want some specialty/novelty fonts.  I've found the
> free[1] ones at larabiefonts.com are of pretty good technical quality
> and cover a fair range of styles, although some of them tend toward
> the bizarre.

I would also recommend the freeware fonts by Nick Curtis.  They're now
at typOasis: http://moorstation.org/typoasis/designers.htm .  (Most of
the other designers there are also worth looking at.)

> Of course, it will be nifty to see if SVG fonts can really take off;
> that would allow for the creation of open-source fonts (which currently
> is technically possible but to get any kind of quality involves expensive
> commercial packages such as Fontographer) using open-source tools. 

I don't really see how SVG fonts would make things any easier -
designing good quality outline fonts is hard, and the format you
save them in makes little difference.

Also, it's difficult to take SVG fonts seriously at present because they
don't support hinting.  Font hinting was in the SVG 1.2 draft some time
ago, but it seems to have been dropped now (at least, I can't find it).

> Does Inkscape have any way to trace around the letters in your card 
> and create SVG shapes based on them?

Yes: Object to Path.  This creates paths using the path data from
the font file.

You inevitably lose the font hinting and easy editability of the 
original text if you do this, so it's not an ideal solution even
when there are no copyright problems.

> Also, what would the copyright implications be of doing so with
> non-public-domain fonts?

I think the outlines are covered by the copyright of the font.

You could instead render the text at a large size and then trace 
it with potrace (better than AutoTrace for this sort of thing).
This would produce paths that are different from those of the font
file, but I'm not sure this is enough to avoid the copyright.

-- 
Stephen Silver