Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 20, 2012 12:14 UTC (Wed) by kramal (guest, #84631)
Parent article: Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

The article says, regarding community-developped fonts like Linux Libertine and DejaVu, that «The perception among the public is that the commercial fonts are of higher quality than the community-built fonts».

Does that perception really exist for Linux Libertine? It's one of the most beautiful general-use fonts that I know (including for-pay fonts). I've typed in whole books in it and loved it. Its italic characters are particularly nice and subtle, and I've heard people express admiration (without knowing what font it was, or that it was free).

Liberation Serif is also looks quite decent, but I'd say it's not quite so elegant,with those big pointed serifs and the pointy hook of the lowercase 'r'.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 20, 2012 12:28 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

Libertine looks quite nice, yes. It's a shame that Biolinum shares with Arial the flaw of I-l underdistinction.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 22, 2012 22:34 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Any san serif font is going to have the problem because it's the serif's that make the distinction. Frankly that's the whole point of using a serif font.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 20, 2012 13:54 UTC (Wed) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link] (6 responses)

I'm definitely not arguing it's a well-informed position. More of the "how good can it be if it's free?" mentality, which is still held by some people against open source software in general.

There are open fonts that are very highly-regarded by typographers (the SIL fonts, for example), but they have to fight against some prejudice from people who conflate "free" which "cheapo."

Nate

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 20, 2012 15:19 UTC (Wed) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] (2 responses)

Usually the font face itself is fine, but the devil is in the quality of the hinting, and how well the small sizes in low DPIs will look. That, and the "fancier" (and by no means superfluous) ligatures, etc.

Professional commercial fonts do take high pains to get these right as a rule. The "free" ones you find scattered all over the web only do very rarely, AFAIK (which *does* mean the font deserves the low quality moniker, it will look awful at low DPIs and small sizes). IMHO, that stereotype is also attributed to the open fonts, be it deserved or not.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 21, 2012 11:20 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

Tangentially, I'm working on a little patch to pixman that enables font rendering results that look like the upper samples (default rendering is on the bottom):

http://bel.fi/~alankila/pixman/fontscol.png
http://bel.fi/~alankila/pixman/fontsinv.png
http://bel.fi/~alankila/pixman/fonts.png

There is no hinting of glyph shapes here, just gamma-corrected compositing from sRGB surface to sRGB surface with freetype's light lcd filter to ensure grayness of the composition results. You should be able to see that the default code as a rule produces too dark rendering results. (And the default lcd filter chosen by cairo generates other kind of color fringing at the smallest sizes, but that is separate topic.)

Merely getting the gamma-corrected compositing right should improve results considerably, especially for small sizes where the error made is the greatest, as can be seen on the darkening and color fringing that results.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 21, 2012 18:37 UTC (Thu) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

Wow, beautiful, I can read your 5 point font.

Also tangentially, here is a little project I worked on earlier this year, a slightly unusual take on 3D font rendering:

http://phunq.net/files/shiny81.png

That is Liberation Serif, which I found very pleasant to work with by the way, both for this subdivision modelling and classic low resolution 2D rendering. Sad to hear its not to be updated. The name is great, it would be a shame if that got locked up and died.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 21, 2012 0:18 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (1 responses)

Most of everything is rubbish, it's just more apparent with fonts. Consider that there must be thousands of web servers written by students each year as they learn their craft, but no one would seriously use one in production. They're certainly not all collected together on websites with names like Free Web Servers.

Google Web Fonts were a real step forward, as they trawled through the dross and said "these fonts are good". Moreover since they are "web" fonts the quality of the font on a screen was important.

Linux users don't download software from the web, so why are they looking for fonts on the web? I'd suggest the reason is the complete lack of attention to fonts in distribution's package managers. They don't even do the simplest thing, such as displaying a sample of the font, let alone allowing searching for fonts by their properties.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 28, 2012 10:45 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

We do to some extent, and you might have missed Fontmatrix.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 21, 2012 20:10 UTC (Thu) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

Liberation Sans 20 pt, hinted, from an unusual perspective:

http://phunq.net/files/font24.png

(Apologizes in advance for the slight jaggies in the near field, which need a higher point size for the nearer glyphs, beyond the scope for this demo.)

This seems like a high quality font to me, including the hinting. In orthogonal, pixel for pixel rendering the effect of hinting is more dramatic of course but I think it improves the quality of even the perspective case. I noticed one odd and most probably undesirable behaviour: the hinting algorithm may move the end point but not the interior control point of a quadratic Bezier hull, resulting in an S-shaped artifact in the smooth outline. This can't be good for rasterizing. I doubt it is an error in my outline generator, but of course it could be, and I am not 100% sure whether the issue comes from the font hints or the hinting engine, but it looks like the latter to me.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 20, 2012 17:33 UTC (Wed) by walex (guest, #69836) [Link] (1 responses)

«commercial fonts are of higher quality than the community-built fonts».

Does that perception really exist for Linux Libertine? It's one of the most beautiful general-use fonts that I know (including for-pay fonts).

Here almost certainly "quality" refers to "on-screen quality", that is how well the font renders at much low DPI than printing.

This used to require extensive hinting, especially for TrueType fonts, and hinting TTF used to require special expensive tools, and a large amount of tedious work, and thus as a rule only commercial fonts, like the Microsoft Web Fonts, were well-hinted.

Various Linux suppliers have been in recent years paying foundries to improve the hinting of the fonts they sponsor, the free FontForge tool now makes hinting easier, and as a result some freeware fonts are not somewhat well hinted for low DPI, notably DejaVu, in my impression.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 21, 2012 9:23 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

The big ugly secret is that Microsoft web fonts were *not* well-hinted.

To get good web font rendering in windows microsoft had to workaround those web font bugs in the font rendering stack of windows of the time

That's why :
1. microsoft web fonts look ugly anywhere else (it's not the other font stacks which are bad it's the font themselves which have buggy hints)
2. other fonts (with clean hints) look bad on windows when they trigger web-font specific workarounds they don't need

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 21, 2012 6:54 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

To me the big mystery is why anyone still bothers with Liberation, or Deja Vu, or any of the numerous other ugly faces. Libertine is so clearly superior to them all -- even Droid -- there can be no contest where merit is considered.

I jimmied my fontconfig to substitute Libertine for everything except mono (where I use Inconsolata -- thanks Raph). I use Biolinum for window titles, and have altered Libertine so that the traditional looped st and ct ligatures are treated as standard. (One of the disappointments of Google Chrome is that it doesn't substitute standard ligatures. Or didn't, when last I checked. It's been a long time since I looked at Chrome or Google+.)

If anybody can suggest how to persuade (e.g.) Firefox to consider traditional ligatures standard without changing the font file, I would be very grateful.

Likewise, if anybody can suggest how to persuade (e.g.) Firefox to do spacing between bold letters correctly, I would be very grateful.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 21, 2012 8:51 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

To me the big mystery is why anyone still bothers with Liberation, or Deja Vu, or any of the numerous other ugly faces.

De gustibus non est disputandum.