2007 Red Hat Summit coverage

Posted May 10, 2007 20:51 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
Parent article: 2007 Red Hat Summit coverage

This bit has more FLOSS consequences:
http://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/

2007 Red Hat Summit coverage

Posted May 10, 2007 22:04 UTC (Thu) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link]

Thats good news; its a very nice looking font. I hope they will provide
some means for the community to contribute to it offically. Most font
contributions I've seen companies make seem to be one-time code drops,
without any means for improvements to be reincorporated, so then dozens of
people end up making forks.

2007 Red Hat Summit coverage

Posted May 10, 2007 22:38 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (2 responses)

I wanted to like it, but these fonts aren't as nice as Bitstream Vera. At size 8 Vera Sans is much nicer than Liberation Sans. Liberation Mono has blurry color fringes that Vera Sans Mono lacks. Were these fonts developed specifically because Vera's license is considered not free enough?

2007 Red Hat Summit coverage

Posted May 10, 2007 22:48 UTC (Thu) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link]

The currently released Liberation font contains no hinting information,
hence the blurry edges. Until they release the version with hinting, you
can probably improve your results by giving freetype's autohinter a shot.

2007 Red Hat Summit coverage

Posted May 11, 2007 4:44 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

The main reason as indicated in the article was to get FLOSS fonts metric-compatible with microsoft core fonts.

Despite all its qualities Vera (and its main enhanced fork DejaVu) has different metrics than Arial & Times New Roman, so if you replace these fonts with DejaVu in a document the blocks of text sizes will change. And you'll get all sorts of formatting side effects (page break changes, table cell overflows, etc)

For new documents it's certainly safer to use DejaVu/Vera from the start on.

2007 Red Hat Summit coverage

Posted May 10, 2007 23:00 UTC (Thu) by cook (subscriber, #4) [Link]

The article has been ammended, thanks for the pointer.

The glass is half empty for me

Posted May 11, 2007 2:00 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

That's just Latin, Greek and Cyrillic as used in Europe. No Hebrew, no Arabic, no Georgian, no Armenian, no Asian Latin, no non-Slavic Cyrillic. And of course no Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

I'm staying with DejaVu.