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Finding and using free fontsFinding and using free fontsPosted Jan 22, 2009 10:04 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)Parent article: Finding and using free fonts
1. As others stated, many of the fonts highlighted there are totally useless for world users at large because of their lack of Unicode coverage. The western font design community should really stop thinking the ASCII block is all that matters. No matter how cool they are, a font that only includes about a hundred glyphs is a toy.
2. DejaVu is not bad at all, especially if you use the Freetype autohinter (and not insist like some distros on using the patented bytecode interpreter)
3. Google Droid should be noted too
4. TEX and especially GUST have some good fonts. Unfortunately they don't make a lot of effort to check their licensing, making inclusion in law-abiding distros hard (the Gyre fonts are a very unfortunate example)
5. Debian and Fedora have specific font efforts, with coherent packaging and licensing check rules. Other distros seem to still ignore fonts specificities and perform had'hoc packaging
Fedora in particular is currently performing a complete distro re-packaging and auditing of its fonts, which should land for F11
Automatic font auto-installation is also being implemented
6. Many of the font problems users experience on Linux are due to:
7. Good community links:
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Finding and using free fonts Posted Jan 22, 2009 12:47 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] TEX and especially GUST have some good fonts.I thought TeX's fonts were in a different format (Metafont) which desktop environments and X11 do not support? Is there a way to turn Metafont typefaces like Computer Modern into Truetype or Opentype? I think it would need to be done separately for a range of sizes, since the shape of Metafont glyphs changes with font size (they are not simply scaled up and down). Unfortunately they don't make a lot of effort to check their licensing, making inclusion in law-abiding distros hardI think that TeX Live makes a good effort to include only free software and free fonts, which is why it can be included in Fedora.
Finding and using free fonts Posted Jan 22, 2009 13:40 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
1. Most TEX users do not realise, but modern TEX (XETEX...) can use TTF/OTF fonts. It has to because that's the formats the rest of the world uses so MF is an evolutionary dead-end. TEX users need to access fonts created by other projects (and other projects need access to TEX fonts)
For this reason recent TEX efforts produce OTF fonts (STIX, TEX Gyre, etc)
2. TEX people have been lax in licensing in the past (so many historic TEX fonts are not clearly licensed or cleanly licensed)
« I will leave texlive aside as an exercise in futility. I may write more about that if/when I ever manage to finish auditing that steaming pile. »¹
and GUST in particular continues to be (unauthorised relicensing of GPL GS fonts to their own pet license: see page 8 of
¹ http://spot.livejournal.com/303000.html (Tom Callaway handles licensing problems for Fedora)
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