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

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

"Jose Hevia" <100026838 at alumnos.uc3m.es> writes:

>> 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.
>
> I think this is exactly the reason it could be very good. People
> have not a lot of time to create complete font collections, but if
> it's easy enough ,a lot of people could join just to make one or two
> letters each own simply with inks.  

I'm not sure that would come out very well.  In font design,
consistency is very important -- having all of the letters use the
same vertical positions for related parts of the letters, the same
widths for similar letter forms, the same basic thicknesses for
comparable letter parts, similarly sized serifs, and so on and so
forth, is important; if the font is inconsistent, it looks bad, even
to people who don't have the eye to know that the inconsistency is
what looks bad about it.

However, there are probably a lot of people out there like me who
might make and release just one or two fonts, to scratch an itch.  My
particular itch is for high-quality freely redistributable and
embeddable (so I can include it in anything) monospaced font with
minimal-to-nonexistent serifs and visually distinctive forms for all
the printable ASCII characters (e.g., no two of iIl1|!  look very
similar).  Andale Mono is very nice, but it's not embeddable.
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is also nice, but having only one font to
choose from is a bummer -- what if I want a font that's a bit taller
and narrower in its design, or one that's more short and squat, or
thinner, or darker?  I'm stuck, at present.  Additionally, a serrifed
monospaced font that actually looks good would be nice to have on
occasion; Courier New is uglier than a lime-green minivan, and what
else is there?

The situation with proportional fonts is significantly better, but
there are still nitches where particular fonts would be nice to have.
For example, it would be nice to have an embeddable font with a nice
clean easy-to-read yet informal look, along the lines of Comic Sans
MS.  Comic Sans MS can be redistributed in its original (.exe
installer package) form, but I can't do just anything with it that I
want, so a more freely usable replacement would be nice to have.  (To
me, this is less important, and not something I'd work on; for my
purposes, I'd rather have another monospaced font to choose from.  But
I can imagine someone else wanting to work on this.)

And, as you point out, if our efforts leave something to be desired,
someone else could jump in and make improvements, if we license them
in a manner that allows that.  For example, I would probably only
bother to do printable ASCII characters, but if someone else wanted to
take the trouble to expand it to cover other character sets they'd
have my blessing.  Similarly, a lot of freeware fonts only really
provide one case (usually by providing identical letter forms for both
cases of each letter), but if an open-source font were released like
this, someone else could fill in the other case.

-- 
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