[Clipart] SVG font

[Jon Phillips]

On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 12:54 -0400, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> 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.

Ok, so you are advocating for including fonts?

Jon

-- 
Jon Phillips

USA PH 510.499.0894
jon at rejon.org
http://www.rejon.org

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