[Openfontlibrary] fw: [Tipografia] [Gentium] Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing
hello open font library, i think this might be of interest of this list... http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php? site_id=nrsiitem_id=Gentium_basic best, - gustavo. ps: i wonder why this has not been annouced here? Begin forwarded message: Date: 15 de novembro de 2007 5h50min53s PST To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Tipografia] [Gentium] Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing Reply-To: Lista de discussão de Tipografia e Caligrafia (em português) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentium-Announce List Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing - - - - - - - - Dear friends of Gentium, Great news! We have been hard at work to complete the first versions of Gentium that include bold and bold italic. For the first time in many years we have a major release for you - in a preliminary test version. We have two new font families in the Gentium clan: Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic. Each has a complete set of four weights: regular, italic, bold and bold italic. Gentium Book Basic is generally heavier than the original Gentium and better for some publishing uses. Both families also include a few OpenType and Graphite smart font features, including optimized diacritic positioning. I've appended parts of the Gentium Basic FONTLOG below to give you more detailed information on these fonts. The new fonts are called 'Basic' because they support a smaller set of characters than the full Gentium fonts. They only support basic Latin and a handful of extended Latin characters. There is no Greek or Cyrillic, or even full IPA. The purpose is to provide early versions of the new weights that meet the needs of most Latin script users. Never fear - we haven't abandoned the main Gentium fonts. Our next task will be to return to them and complete an update of the existing regular and italic to add extended Cyrillic, ancient Greek glyphs, Unicode 5.1 updates, and smart font capabilities. We'd hoped to have this completed by now, but wanted to get the new weights to you as soon as we could. After that we plan to expand the main Gentium family to include these new weights and smart font code. The new Basic fonts are only available in beta test right now. They contain known bugs, so we don't yet recommend them for everyday production use, or as the source for derivative versions. The most serious one is that the lowercase 'z' has too much space in the heavier italic weights. We plan to release a fixed, final release of the Basic fonts in a month or two, once initial broad testing is done. So we welcome your bug reports and general opinions on the design of the heavier faces. The beta test fonts are available at: http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium_basic A few requests: - please note the limitations and known problems - please do not ask us to expand the Basic character set, as those needs will be met by the complete Gentium font family - please report problems to me at the email address below, not via the download feedback form on the main Gentium download page Thanks again for your interest in Gentium, and the many encouraging emails you have sent. Victor Gaultney Gentium /at/ sil.org == FONTLOG Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic v1.1b1 (test release) == This file provides detailed information on the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic font families. This information should be distributed along with the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts and any derivative works. NOTE: These fonts are intended only for preliminary testing, as they contain bugs. Many aspects of the fonts, including glyph metrics, may change before the final release. Basic Font Information -- Gentium (belonging to the nations in Latin) is a Unicode typeface family designed to enable the many diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. Gentium has won a Certificate of Excellence in Typeface Design in two major international typeface design competitions: bukva:raz! (2001), TDC2003 (2003). The Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic font families are based on the original design, but with additional weights. The Book family is slightly heavier. Both families come with a complete regular, bold, italic and bold italic set of fonts. The supported character set, however, is much smaller than for the main Gentium fonts. These Basic fonts support only the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement Unicode ranges, plus a selection of the more commonly used extended Latin characters, with miscellaneous
Re: [Openfontlibrary] fw: [Tipografia] [Gentium] Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing
On Nov 16, 2007 12:37 AM, Gustavo Ferreira wrote: ps: i wonder why this has not been annouced here? Or why SIL's announcements mailing list is silent despite of releases being out :( Alexandre ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
[Openfontlibrary] Tiresias fonts
http://www.tiresias.org/ associated with the Scientific Research Unit of the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) in the UK has released a series of professionally designed fonts made for people with visual disabilities (they are nice fonts for everyone else as well). see: http://www.tiresias.org/fonts/index.htm http://www.tiresias.org/fonts/fonts_download.htm - Chris ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
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
Re: [Openfontlibrary] fw: [Tipografia] [Gentium] Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing
On 15/11/2007, Gustavo Ferreira [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ps: i wonder why this has not been annouced here? Well, you just announced it :-) This is good news - I didn't think this would be out until next year :-) -- Regards, Dave ___ Openfontlibrary mailing list Openfontlibrary@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
