Re: [Openfontlibrary] droid fonts
On 15/11/2007, Gustavo Ferreira [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: it seems like the plattform is going to be free software – but not the fonts? The 5 page PDF type specimen PDF - http://www.ascendercorp.com/pdf/Droid_fonts.pdf - from the Ascender website has the following introductory text: The Droid Typeface Family was designed in the Fall of 2006 by Ascender's Steve Matteson. The goal was to provide optimal quality and comfort on a mobile handset when rendered in application menus, web browsers and for other screen text. Ascender Corporation worked closely with the Open Handset Alliance to develop these system fonts for the Android platform – a complete mobile phone software stack that will be made available under the Apache open source license. I read 'system fonts for the Android platform ... that will be made available under the Apache open source license' :-) -- Regards, Dave ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
Re: [Openfontlibrary] droid fonts
Dave Crossland wrote: ... I read 'system fonts for the Android platform ... that will be made available under the Apache open source license' :-) In this case I'd wait till you read the actual licence in the fonts. Ascender is not particularly in the Free and OpenSource fonts camp... see: http://www.ascendercorp.com/webfontstudy.html They are also the marketing agents for Microsoft® fonts. - Chris ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
Re: [Openfontlibrary] droid fonts
Dave Crossland wrote: On 15/11/2007, Christopher Fynn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In this case I'd wait till you read the actual licence in the fonts. Yes; lots of chatter about how much freedom Google is giving with these phones, since what is available now is totally proprietary. But I hope they will release it under Apache 2. (GPLv3 compatible :-) Ascender is not particularly in the Free and OpenSource fonts camp... They are also the marketing agents for Microsoft(R) fonts. Yes, this is true, but they did Red Hat's Liberation fonts too, so they are more in the sofware-freedom camp then any other proprietary foundry, afaik Hi Dave I suspect Red Hat paid Bill Davis / Ascender for the Liberation fonts - and Google has probably paid them for the Droid fonts too. If Google commissioned the Droid fonts then the choice of license will of course be theirs and, if the licence for those fonts is open, the credit for that should probably go to them not to Ascender. Ascender's web fonts survey used an incredibly biased set of tests 1. TrueType hinting tables – 8.9% failed (404 TrueType fonts had improper/incomplete tables*) This test checks for the presence of ‘fpgm’, ‘prep’, and ‘cvt’ tables. If all three tables are present the font passes, if any or all are missing the font fails this test. The consequence of a failure is that the font will be flagged as having errors in FontBook under Mac OS X 10.4. - I suspect most of the font tested were created long before FontBook on Mac OS X 10.4 came out. To pass this even unhinted fonts need these tables even if they contain no useful data. Anyway I understand this has been fixed in Mac OSX 10.5 - The statement Fonts that have hinting information will have better screen quality in Windows than a font with no hinting information. is imho not always true - With TrueType fonts bad hinting instructions or poor quality auto hinting may be worse than no hinting at all. I've noticed the on-the-fly auto hinting in FreeType often renders even many commercial fonts better than when the hinting instructions in the font are applied. Code Page 1252 character set – 80.8% failed (3696 fonts missing one or more characters) Mac Roman character set – 95.9% failed (4385 fonts missing one or more characters) - Without looking at the details of which particular characters are missing these figures are not very significant. - If the missing characters are not used or very rarely used on web pages how significant is their absence?. I'm thinking about things like mu (B5) cedilla (B8) in the Windows ANSI 1253 code page, approxequal (C5) and Delta (C6) in Mac Roman. - For English language only web sites in most cases you could drop many other non ASCII characters in these code pages. (This is just what sub-setting in embedded fonts does.) - All Adobe's fonts which used the Adobe character set would also fail this test. - Thinking beyond these two code pages there are of course examples of high quality free fonts like Gentium which has far better character coverage than almost any commercial font. Also how many of the tested free fonts were symbol fonts or similar? Trademark string – 1.7% failed (78 fonts missing a trademark string - If the font name or foundry name is not a registered trademark why should the Trademark string field contain any data? Embedding restriction – 30.3% failed (1386 fonts set to “Restricted” or improper fsType) - My guess an equally large percentage of commercial fonts would be set to Restricted or have some limitations on embedding Anyway the Ascender survey at least makes the point that we should strive for *quality* in free and open source fonts. Perhaps the OpenFont library could perform a very useful service to users by setting some kind of real standard indicating the quality of fonts and pointing out technical faults. Maybe some kind of seal of approval for truly high quality free fonts conducted by design professionals? Objective comparisons between particular free fonts and similar fonts from commercial foundry might also be useful. This would perhaps give free fonts more credibility and be an answer to the kind of survey Ascender made. The current ratings and reviews in the OpenFont library are nice but imo pretty subjective. - Chris ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
Re: [Openfontlibrary] droid fonts
Στις 15-11-2007, ημέρα Πεμ, και ώρα 11:35 -0800, ο/η Jon Phillips έγραψε: On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 16:31 +, Dave Crossland wrote: On 15/11/2007, Gustavo Ferreira [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: it seems like the plattform is going to be free software – but not the fonts? The 5 page PDF type specimen PDF - http://www.ascendercorp.com/pdf/Droid_fonts.pdf - from the Ascender website has the following introductory text: The Droid Typeface Family was designed in the Fall of 2006 by Ascender's Steve Matteson. The goal was to provide optimal quality and comfort on a mobile handset when rendered in application menus, web browsers and for other screen text. Ascender Corporation worked closely with the Open Handset Alliance to develop these system fonts for the Android platform – a complete mobile phone software stack that will be made available under the Apache open source license. I read 'system fonts for the Android platform ... that will be made available under the Apache open source license' :-) Dave, why don't you go ahead and directly contact them and find out the license they want to apply to these...I think ask first and then persuade to do OFL later :) Apparently the fonts can be extracted from the binary image found in the SDK, http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-font-family-courtesy-of-google-ascender Simos ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
Re: [Openfontlibrary] droid fonts
On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 16:31 +, Dave Crossland wrote: On 15/11/2007, Gustavo Ferreira [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: it seems like the plattform is going to be free software – but not the fonts? The 5 page PDF type specimen PDF - http://www.ascendercorp.com/pdf/Droid_fonts.pdf - from the Ascender website has the following introductory text: The Droid Typeface Family was designed in the Fall of 2006 by Ascender's Steve Matteson. The goal was to provide optimal quality and comfort on a mobile handset when rendered in application menus, web browsers and for other screen text. Ascender Corporation worked closely with the Open Handset Alliance to develop these system fonts for the Android platform – a complete mobile phone software stack that will be made available under the Apache open source license. I read 'system fonts for the Android platform ... that will be made available under the Apache open source license' :-) Dave, why don't you go ahead and directly contact them and find out the license they want to apply to these...I think ask first and then persuade to do OFL later :) Jon -- Jon Phillips San Francisco, CA USA PH 510.499.0894 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rejon.org MSN, AIM, Yahoo Chat: kidproto Jabber Chat: [EMAIL PROTECTED] IRC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note: the contents of this email are not intended to be legal advice nor should they be relied upon as or represented to be legal advice. Jon Phillips does not represent any organization through this email address. ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
[Openfontlibrary] droid fonts
Ascender creates the new Droid font collection for Open Handset Alliance's Android platform http://www.ascendercorp.com/pr/pr2007_11_12.html thanks dave for forwarding this link. it seems like the plattform is going to be free software – but not the fonts? regards, - gustavo. ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
