Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0 [LWN.net]

Progress on the Libertine Open Fonts Project continues with the release of version 2.1.0. "Letters and fonts have two charakteristics: On the one hand they are basic elements of communication and fundament of our culture, on the other hand they are cultural goods and artcraft. You are able to see just the first aspect, but when it comes to software you'll see copyrights and patents even on the most elementary fonts. Therefore we want to give you an alternative: This is why we founded The Libertine Open Fonts Project." (Thanks to Philipp Poll.)

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 4, 2006 17:23 UTC (Fri) by kornak (guest, #17589) [Link] (8 responses)

I apologize ahead of time for my ignorance of this subject, but what is
involved with making a new font? Why is it such a big deal that it would
require patents and IP and lawyers and etc? Am I alone in this view?

Making fonts

Posted Aug 4, 2006 17:26 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (5 responses)

Making good fonts is a lot of work - it is a serious artistic endeavor. Have a look at the Metafont Book by Knuth sometime; few people use metafont anymore, but there's a lot of good information on the kinds of things one has to do. (The TeXbook also remains a great reference on how text layout and typesetting should be done, incidentally, even if you never plan to use TeX).

Making fonts

Posted Aug 4, 2006 17:34 UTC (Fri) by kornak (guest, #17589) [Link]

I guess I have lived in the command line for so long I have forgotten that
there is a a whole world outside of the matrix ;)

Making fonts

Posted Aug 4, 2006 20:33 UTC (Fri) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link] (3 responses)

> Making good fonts is a lot of work - it is a serious artistic endeavor.

But like he said, what does that have to do with patents and IP and lawyers? The linked web pages is talking about "when it comes to software you'll see copyrights and patents even on the most elementary fonts." How does that stop me from buying a copy of Fontographer and making my own fonts and giving them away? It doesn't.

Making fonts

Posted Aug 4, 2006 22:23 UTC (Fri) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (2 responses)

Many of the algorithms for interpreting hints on fonts are patented. So you can do bitmaps or outlines, but much of the important pixel-aligning and cleanup for different resolutions remains off-limits.

Though, now that you mention it, that's more of a problem for rendering the fonts than for creating them.

Making fonts

Posted Aug 5, 2006 3:18 UTC (Sat) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link] (1 responses)

> Though, now that you mention it, that's more of a problem for rendering
> the fonts than for creating them.

Exactly my point. :-)

Making fonts

Posted Aug 5, 2006 8:49 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Oh god font IP suck.

I mean it's horrible. Fonts are kinda boring subject, but they are very very important.

Fonts were the first major thing computer companies fought over.. Type1 fonts, TrueType, and other types are things people went to war over. '

Some idea of what was involved is indicated by this page:
http://www.prepressure.com/fonts/history01.htm

Adobe vs Apple vs Microsoft. competiting font technologies, some failed. Truetype fonts were a response to IP held over Type1 fonts. That sort of thing.

There are even specific font technologies created to fight font piracy.

Can you imagine DRM'd FONTS?

I used to know more about it. Not so much anymore.

Also keep in mind that fonts have a huge emotional impact on the reader. Different style fonts evoke elegance vs loud speaking vs seriousness. Several times you would have specific fonts created for specific orginizations as a sort of trademark. People spend a lot of money and put a lot of protections around things like that.

News papers, special publications, advertisers would have their own fonts.

If your a publisher having access to high quality fonts are critical. There are font catalogs, font collections. There are many companies that create fonts and fight to protect their 'IP' strongly. You can spend a lot of money on something as seemingly simple as fonts. A LOT of money.

For companies to donate fonts to Linux it is a big deal. And for the desktop it's a big deal.

Something as simple as fonts can have a huge impact on usability. Bad fonts are hard to read, look ugly, and can cause a clunky feeling to a application.. Very good fonts and good rendering can take even relatively simple applications and just make them look good.

Also they can add a certain level of improvement over basic UI. Microsoft will use specific fonts to help people discerne different aspects of applications and such. Not that I am a UI expert or anything.

I can bet that Microsoft spent a lot of money on those 'webcore' fonts they released.

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 4, 2006 19:12 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link] (1 responses)

Font production companies (such as Adobe) describe their fonts as 'font programs' which they attempt to patent, instead of artistic works covered by copyright. The difference is that with a copyright only the specific implementation is covered, rather than the 'look' of the font--the design aspect is not covered by copyright. This is why there are so many fonts floating around that are visually indistinguishable from very popular fonts such as Futura, Frutiger, etc. So there is a large effort underway to get fonts declared (by whatever means possible) to be programs rather than data, to make them patentable and therefore in theory "protected" from having their design "stolen". (Never mind that many of these same fonts' design parameters and visual styles are... umm... "borrowed" from other font designers in the past [the many Garamond derivatives are a prime example], but they're not alive now to hire patent lawyers, are they? Oh well, too bad.)

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 5, 2006 9:09 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Ya can't copyright type faces.

Sorry. Not in the United states at least. It's a specificly says so in the copyright law.

No copyright no typeface. :)

It has to do with what Fonts are. They are not artistic expressions, but practical usable tools that have artistic elements. Freedom of the press and all sorts of crazy stuff like that I don't understand.

But to protect typefaces there two ways to do it:
Trademark the name of the font.
If the font is unique and wonderfull in some way then it is possible to get a 'design patent' on it although I expect that that would be difficult.

In fact many many major copies (oh.. say Bitstream) got their start by simply pirating established popular fonts of bigger companies. Very simply they copied the design and re-sold them under different names at a cheaper price.

If you ever heard the term 'junk font' this is were it comes from. Lots of very crappy (not bitstream!) companies started up and copied fonts off of each other and made up fancy fonts.. All of these were just crap.

If you go on the internet and look for 'free fonts' (nocost) you can find thousands and thousands of ugly, retarded looking fonts that look ok until you try to use them. They look clunky, dirty, and often are hard to read.

Fonts are specificly patentable items if they are new and unique.

Unfortunately for people who make fonts for a living they've been around for about... oh... 10. 20 thousand years now? :P Printing press has been around for how long?

Pretty long when it comes to patentable technology. Your going to be challenged to come up with something very unique.

Also this is very U.S. specific stuff.

See 'Design Patents' in Wikipedia. This is a entirely different realm then copyright or patent law involving programs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

Also see a blurb about copyright law involving fonts there also.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
"Typefaces

In the United States, typeface designs are not covered by copyright, but may be covered by design patents if sufficiently novel. Germany (in 1981) passed a special law for typeface protection (Schriftzeichengesetz). It adds some specific extensions to the design patent law (Geschmacksmustergesetz) such that typefaces can be registered as designs.

The United Kingdom (in 1989) have passed a law making typeface designs copyrightable. The British law is retroactive, so designs produced before 1989 are also copyrighted if the copyrights would not have already expired."

Of course Adobe and such would like to have stuff under software patents...

I bet it's a thousand times easier and cheaper to get a software patent then it is to get a new design patent on typefaces.

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 4, 2006 18:17 UTC (Fri) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link] (8 responses)

My doubt is, how different are Libertine fonts from GNU Free, Déjà Vu or SIL Gentium ones?

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 4, 2006 20:30 UTC (Fri) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] (6 responses)

Unfortunately, they are not nearly as professional, but amateurish from a graphic design viewpoint. (Apologies for the harshness - while I truly appreciate any effort of designing truly free fonts, a spade still needs to be called a spade.)

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 4, 2006 20:46 UTC (Fri) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link] (1 responses)

What don't you like about them? I looked at their sample pdf, and for the alphabets I care about, it seems to me to look nicer than DejaVu Serif... But I am not a font designer. What defects do you see?

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 10, 2006 13:07 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

After using my font viewing tools to properly examine this offering and compare it to other fonts I must agree with the earlier poster that Libertine falls a little short of the standard we've come to expect.

Latin capital M U+004D looks terrible to me, almost unfinished, and several characters seem not to be aligned to a common baseline, meaning they'll appear to "bounce" if used in some combinations in text.

There are some strange inconsistencies in the underlined variant, places where an approach which worked for the ordinary serif typeface falls apart when replicated with underlining. Comparing two fractions like U+00BC vs U+215D we see an example of this, either these characters were never looked at by a human at all, or they're the work of separate individuals without a common style guide to consult.

The project aims to be a replacement for Times New Roman, which means (depending on how literal you want to be) that they're aiming for a body font, something readable in dense text and perhaps aimed at the printed page rather than the screen. I wish them lots of success in that goal, but I wouldn't include this as a replacement for any commonly distributed Linux font today, it needs more work.

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 4, 2006 22:28 UTC (Fri) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (2 responses)

I think you misunderstood the question. It was about differences, not about similarity. If you took time to check all those fonts enough to characterize them as amateurish, probably you could also describe the differences between them?

If you have any specific complains about free fonts, please show your appreciation in the form of bug reports.

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 5, 2006 23:29 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Of course don't mention to him that Deja Vu fonts are a elaboration on the Bistream Vera fonts.

Bitstream, of course, happens to be one of the largest professional maker of fonts and typefaces in the world.

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 6, 2006 3:10 UTC (Sun) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

Indeed, it sounds strange when somebody finds time and desire to review four font families, to participate in this discussion and to criticize those fonts, yet the same person doesn't give a slightest hint as to what exactly is wrong.

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 7, 2006 10:59 UTC (Mon) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link]

A dictionary is needed here.

"Professional" means you paid a lot of money for it. Things you paid a lot of money for are automatically better than the other stuff, because otherwise it would mean you've wasted money. People don't like wasting money, so they admire things they've paid a lot of money for.

"Amateurish" means it was made by someone who loved to make it. That's what "amateur" means -- one who works for love. (No, not that kind of love.) Sometimes this means their passion exceeded their grasp of the arts. Sometimes this means they went far beyond paid-for endurance to get it just right. It's a mixed bag.

To give some examples from the real world, Emacs and TeX are amateurish, while EDLIN and Notepad are professional. OpenOffice is *both*, and still recovering.

Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 2.1.0

Posted Aug 7, 2006 16:50 UTC (Mon) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

I think Wikipedia is a good starting point if you want to research this subject: Free software Unicode fonts