Cutups [LWN.net]

Cutups

Posted Aug 29, 2013 4:02 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
Parent article: Adobe's open source font experience

Those guys at Adobe are almost as brilliantly subtle as The Onion. If you haven't paid very close attention, you might never guess it was all a jape.

But if you study Source Code Pro carefully, it turns out to be a pixel-by-pixel match to (the brilliant!) Inconsolata, except squashed a bit to make more leading, and replacing a few glyphs with wacky mutants. To make the switcheroo a little harder to spot, they shifted the point-size labels so that (e.g.) Source Code Pro 9 is a squashed Inconsolata 11, and similarly up and down the scale.

Good one.

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Cutups

Posted Aug 29, 2013 5:12 UTC (Thu) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

These are not bitmap fonts. (Also: do prove the plagiarism, please. Or GTFO.)

Cutups

Posted Aug 29, 2013 11:09 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

They are not bitmap fonts, but they are rendered on screens using pixels. On a typical 96 dpi laptop screen, the pixels end up in the same place.

It's easy to examine precisely how the faces differ, or don't. In MATE or Gnome2, set one face as the default monospace font, and set the terminal emulator to use the the other face. In the terminal preferences page, rapidly flip the toggle that chooses between using the two, and watch which pixels stay the same, or bounce up and down predictably.

Plagiarism is not possible with typefaces. Any typeface may be based on any other, although it's courteous to acknowledge one's sources, and to name yours in a way that prevents confusion. (Otherwise we might call SCP "Inconsolata Squat".) It's possible that both are derived from a common source. Raph acknowledges debts to Consolas and Bitstream Vera, among others.

Cutups

Posted Aug 29, 2013 11:33 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Can you point us uninitiated folks to the open-source Inconsolata project?

Cutups

Posted Aug 29, 2013 11:39 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Sorry my bad -- was confusing inconsolata with something else, and inconsolata is indeed open source -- but it is monospace and Source Sans isn't (the original blog post says the monospace ones are WIP) -- so I don't see your point. Nor do I see such a striking similarity in general.

Cutups

Posted Aug 30, 2013 17:56 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

From the article, there are two fonts from Adobe, one is Sans Source Pro, which is monospaced.

I'm too lazy to investigate the similarity under discussion.

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Posted Aug 29, 2013 13:46 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (editor, #43041) [Link]

It's far simpler to just open up both fonts in the Google Fonts collection browser; in the "Compare" tab, the app will show the characters from both faces overlayed, so you can clearly see the differences.

Nate

Cutups

Posted Aug 29, 2013 19:14 UTC (Thu) by bvanheu (subscriber, #88814) [Link]

For the lazy:

http://www.google.com/fonts#ReviewPlace:refine/Collection...

Click on the 'compare' tab.

Cutups

Posted Aug 30, 2013 18:07 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Here are the fonts being compared:

http://www.google.com/fonts#ReviewPlace:refine/Collection...

to compare the Source Sans with the fixed width font would be silly.

I must admit this particular rendering makes them look quite different, with inconsolata being much thicker. I have no idea if they are being handled differently in some way.

Cutups

Posted Aug 29, 2013 13:42 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]

(I am not an expert but I care about monospace fonts.)

Aren't all newer monospace fonts sort of look a likes? I used Inconsolata for a number of years before settling at Ubuntu Monospace for all my coding needs.

I just tried comparing Ubuntu Monospace with Source Code Pro and found (to my untrained eye) the usual problematic characters to be even closer to Ubuntu Monospace than to Inconsolata.

Can you provide us with some (superimposed) image showing Inconsolata and Ubuntu Monospace with Source Code Pro? Honestly, IMHO if you super-impose any of these modern monospace fonts (Inconsolata, UbuntuMono, LiberationMono etc) and try hard to see plagiarism, you will be able to "see" it.

BTW, does anyone knows of a tool that would allow me to achieve that easily?

Cutups

Posted Aug 29, 2013 20:08 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Yes, monospace fonts are converging on the Ur-monospace, the one true monospace of the gods. No, this is not plagiarism. It's Evolution in Action. Departures from the ur-norm exploit niches that enable them to compete in protected spaces.

Falcons and hawks have similarly converged on the ur-raptor design from opposite branches of the avian tree. Owls exploit the nocturnal niche.