On Thursday 28 November 2002 01:37 pm, Giuseppe Ghib� wrote: > Igor Izyumin wrote: > > How about fixing the font packages instead? It's not that hard to make a > > set of decent bitmap fonts from the TTF ones. I am pretty sure that > > someone could get the FontLab people (www.pyrus.com) to donate a copy or > > at least sell it at a reduced price. Then you could just fix the broken > > fonts (very > > I think there is no need of FontLab. George Williams has already done > a marvellous job in pfaedit (see pfaedit package in contrib) which can > already do good jobs on TTF and Type1 font editing.
Pfaedit is a good outline editor, but it doesn't do hinting yet. Fontlab currently has the best hinting, but even that doesn't approach the quality of the Monotype (microsoft) fonts. I think Monotype just programmed the bytecode directly. The easier way to accomplish the same goal is to add bitmaps to TT fonts for low resolutions. Pfaedit might be able to do that, I'm not sure. > Note also that Webfonts appears fine when a freetype2 with BCI interpreter > is enabled (so the version from PLF), while our due to Apple patents isn't. > Note also that BCI restrictions only applies to TTF fonts not to Type1 > hinted fonts (so a Type1 font should be preferred [OK, mozilla supports > only TTF, and not PFB, but that's another story..., OOo instead supports > both]). This is not the problem here. The Microsoft fonts appear fine on an unmodified Mandrake install without the bytecode interpreter. Type1 fonts don't, since their hinting mechanism is not designed for screen resolutions and since they aren't really hinted well. > Apart this I think that font copyrights also protects the "glyph" design > (like for music melodies). Otherwise one can easily "clone" a font: > rendering for instance a font like Verdana at an high resolution (e.g. > 10000dpi), autotrace it to vectorize and produce a compatible font > (bytecode instruction the TTF file could be manually added later...). This is actually legal under US law, I believe. US copyright law does not protect typefaces to the same extent as everything else. That's really not necessary, though. You can easily take an old typeface for which the copyright has expired and clone it, and there are plenty of free fonts that have perfectly good outlines. The problem is hinting - making those fonts render well at small sizes and low resolutions. Only professionally-made fonts have good hinting, and Microsoft's are by far the best. If you can add good hinting to an existing font, by all means, do so! Here are some free (as in speech) outline TTF fonts that need hinting to be usable: http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/ -- -- Igor
