On Thursday 11 October 2001 15:46, Sergej Malinovski wrote: | > I am a lowly member of this mail list for more than half a year, but | > it seems to me licensing problems around here have been sorted out a | > long time ago (decades). | | Perhaps, perhaps not. The type1 fonts that are included in XFree86 | have different licenses. Some of them are more free than others. If | Microsoft allowed to distribute it's fonts with XFree86, that wouldn't | make their fonts more Free. XFree86 simply isn't about Free fonts, | they distribute what they are allowed, so of course there are no such | licensing problems to discuss. Correct me if I'm wrong. |
I believe if Microsoft (or Monotype) allowed to distribute their fonts with XFree86 - there is no need to start any, I repeat: ANY, font project (freettf, freepfb, freefont, whatever) Do you seriously believe that you can design font close in quality to Arial? Arial has 1296 glyphs in standard variant, and some special editions of it (for Far East/Asian languages) have up to 40 000 glyphs! Arial was designed with computer display in mind. Its typical HStem and VStem values are optimized to be rasterized on low-resolution devices, like computer displays. Times New Roman (TNR) was recognized by leading font designers (ref. to book by Peter Karow/URW) as *the best* Times. So, you are speaking now like "let's design Mercedes, just do it in our own way, and let it be free". There is no such thing as a free Mercedes. People got used to Arial and TNR. I can assure you that typical (Windows) users is not aware that something against Arial and TNR exist. The point is that Arial is free for personal use, but is not allowed to be distributed. So, we need good free fonts not because Arial is bad, or MS is bad - but because Linux distros can't distribute Arial and TNR. BTW: frankly speaking, it's mostly problem of Linux distributors (like RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera, etc.) I still do not understand position of those companies on good fonts. Obviously, to extend (potential) user base, they need good fonts, as newbies are not very familiar with "getting fonts from indows partition, than installing and configuring it" But experienced Linux users don't need these "completely free fonts*, because they already copied Arial and TNR from Windows partition. As experienced users are already happy on subject, I see no way how your proposal can succeed. Don't you expect that newbies will design/hint fonts, do you? P.S. the only way I see it that leading distributions (RH, MDK, SuSE) unite and provide financing for getting good quality fonts in place. There are good font designers available here, in Russia, and fonts can be developed for a fraction of cost required in US or in Germany. If somebody is interested, pls contact me off-list so we can discuss it in details. -- Vadim Plessky http://kde2.newmail.ru (English) 33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html KDE mini-Themes http://kde2.newmail.ru/themes/ _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
