LWN: Comments on "Adobe's open source font experience"

Adobe's open source font experience

vimja — 2013-09-04T10:50:34+00:00

Just as a side note: Source Code Pro was the font used for the 29c3 logo and official texts:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/wiki/Propaganda#Basic_...

Adobe's open source font experience

n8willis — 2013-09-02T17:25:49+00:00

Have you tried? I haven't, but some of its content includes things that are available for Linux (such as ttx), plus Python and Perl scripts that are likely usable either standalone or with FontForge. The compiled things for which there is no source available is what needs work on the company's side to turn into a real FOSS release, but I'm not sure if any of those would be usable with WINE; it's certainly possible, since they are pretty small and self-contained. I have not delved into it, but it may be quite usable. Getting a better picture of how usable it is would be a good first step toward eventually shaping a real Linux release further down the road.

Nate

Adobe's open source font experience

lsl — 2013-08-30T21:50:16+00:00

> AFDKO is free to download and use, and hoped that people would not let the EULA be an excuse to not get involved.

If not the EULA then certainly the fact that the AFDKO is just plain unavailable for Linux (or any other free operating system).

Adobe's open source font experience

jbailey — 2013-08-30T19:01:38+00:00

Please consider linking "most-viewed post" to the actual post. I think you mean http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-p... but that's a guess.

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k8to — 2013-08-30T18:07:23+00:00

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.

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k8to — 2013-08-30T17:56:44+00:00

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.

Adobe's open source font experience

n8willis — 2013-08-30T13:51:55+00:00

Nothing stops you from using either of the fonts for any purpose you choose.

Nate

Adobe's open source font experience

thedevil — 2013-08-30T06:24:28+00:00

"Brackets is a web application"

IMO, that does not fundamentally change the situation.

"it's a straightforward usability feature"

why not work on a font that is genrally usable as replacement for
Courier then? Or maybe I'm unfair and that's actually what they are
doing, but that is not what your article suggests.

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ncm — 2013-08-29T20:08:33+00:00

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.

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bvanheu — 2013-08-29T19:14:16+00:00

For the lazy:

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

Click on the 'compare' tab.

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n8willis — 2013-08-29T13:46:24+00:00

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

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fb — 2013-08-29T13:42:37+00:00

(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?

Adobe's open source font experience

n8willis — 2013-08-29T13:37:15+00:00

Brackets is a web application; they can deliver a better font via @font-face, so the user experience is better. I'm not seeing what's wrong with that. While they could just omit it and fall back on the browser's default monospaced font, then you'd get things like Courier's indistinguishable 0/O and 1/l. That has nothing to do with having the font "be recognizable;" it's a straightforward usability feature.

Nate

Adobe's open source font experience

corbet — 2013-08-29T13:22:21+00:00

This account says that too, toward the end...

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rsidd — 2013-08-29T11:39:51+00:00

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.

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rsidd — 2013-08-29T11:33:41+00:00

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

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ncm — 2013-08-29T11:09:24+00:00

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.

Adobe's open source font experience

pabs — 2013-08-29T10:20:46+00:00

In another account of this talk I read that Adobe are working on releasing AFDKO as free software:

http://understandingfonts.com/blog/2013/08/typecon-portland/

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jubal — 2013-08-29T05:12:12+00:00

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

Adobe's open source font experience

thedevil — 2013-08-29T04:50:49+00:00

Also, this

"Adobe created the Source Sans Pro font because the company has been
developing more open source software in recent years, and it needed
fonts that it could incorporate into its releases"

is dangerous nonsense. As if each application needed its own special
font to be recognized by! Why not do the right thing and let the user
choose one (or at most a very few) font for the entire "desktop"?
Consistency, what a concept!!

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ncm — 2013-08-29T04:02:07+00:00

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.