[Clipart] SVG font

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

benji at bensuz.com writes:

> I do plan on eventually making another better font. What I'd like to
> know is what type of font is most needed? What kind of font would
> you like to see and what is going to be the most usefull?

One kind of font that the world does *not* need more of IMO is *ding*
fonts -- Dingbats, Wingdings, Webdings, and so on and so forth.  To my
way of thinking, that's just an especially simple and limited form of
clipart, and so doing actual clipart is preferable to doing that.

Sets of fonts that go together are great -- for instance, a seriffed
proportional font, a sans proportional font, and a fixed-width font,
all with similar style and weights, is very useful.  Taken
individually, yet another plain-looking seriffed font is not
particularly appealing, but if it has matching sans and monospaced
fonts that look good with it, that puts it in rather more limited
company.  There are only a handful of such sets readily available at
this time.  (There are the Bitstream Vera ones, which are pretty good,
and there are the Lucida ones, which are pretty widely deployed but
AFAIK not freely redistributable; if you don't need the fixed-width
one, there are two reasonble sets of matching serif/sans from
Microsoft (TNR/Arial and Georgia/Verdana, the latter being
substantially the nicer set), but the fixed-width fonts that
supposedly go with these (Courier New, which is horrid in virtually
all respects, and Andale Mono, which looks good by itself but does not
match any of the other Core fonts well).  So having another set of
these, particularly a good free set, would be really nice.

Aside from that, good, clean, legible fonts that have some style to
them are good.  A lot of the freely-available fonts out there (e.g.,
most of the Larabie fonts) are either too mangled/grunge or simply too
elaborate to be usable in most scenerios, because they're too hard to
read at normal sizes.  Many of the rest are basically just rehashes of
standard type styles (e.g., Yet Another Times Font), with no real
stylistic distinctiveness of their own.  The ones I find myself liking
and using are the ones that have a distinctive and good style, but are
yet quite legible.  For instance, if you look at the Larabie fonts,
one of the ones I find most generally useful is Adventure.  (The worst
thing about it is that it doesn't have distinct upper and lower case
forms, which is entirely too common IMO, although I understand the
reasons for doing fonts that way.)

I'm not saying copy Adventure, instead of copying Times; that would
be missing the point.

And yes, I realize I'm being distinctly vague.

If you want a single, specific suggestion, my sister majored in
Elementary Education and keeps complaining that almost all of the
fonts available have the kinds of letterforms you see printed in books
for adults, rather than the kinds of forms taught in elementary
school.  For instance, most fonts (including most sans-seriffed fonts)
make the lowercase a "funny", with the hooked top, instead of simple
(for an example of a simple "a" shape, see Comic Sans MS).  Elementary
teachers would really like fonts that make the basic letter forms the
way they are in first-grade hand-printing workbooks.  (This doesn't
necessarily mean no serifs; it just means no changing the whole shape
of the letter.  For instance, most available seriffed fonts make the
lowercase "g" with the stem on the left and a loop on the bottom;
elementary teachers want the stem on the right and a hook on the
bottom; there can be serifs or not, they don't care as much about
that.)  The *only* well-known and widely-deployed font that suits them
is Comic Sans MS, which is freely redistributable but not freely
modifiable, and of course it would be nice to have more than one
available type style.

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