On Thu, 11 Oct 2001, Vadim Plessky wrote:
> 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.
Do you really think Arial and Times New Roman are so good? I
shouldn't say anything about latin parts (while ordinary Times looks
*much* better to me). As to cyrillic parts of these fonts, from the
aestetical point of view they are *awful*.
Arial "roman" is okay, but Arial Italic is... It is neither
italic nor oblique: some letters are italic ("de", "i", "tse") while
others are oblique ("pe", "el", "em"). Legibility of text typeset in
Arial is *much* worse than that in Helvetica.
Times New Roman is also (to say at least) non-perfect. The
"Cyrillic K" is a strange mixture of Times and Schoolbook styles: the
upper-right stroke is curved as in Schoolbook, while the lower-right
stroke is straight, as it should be (in *good* Times which were used in
pre-computer era in Russia, cyrillic K was identical to latin one).
See
http://www.monotypeuk.com/vFontData/Disk1Graphics/packages/monotyp5/1207/trc_____.gif
(Times New Roman Cyrillic)
http://www.monotypeuk.com/vFontData/Disk1Graphics/packages/monotyp5/1277/cbc_____.gif
(Century Schoolbook Cyrillic)
To perephrase a well-known joke, "Microsoft-supplied fonts are to
quality typesetting what Macdonald's is to gourmet cooking". These fonts
are usable, but only if no good fonts are available.
BTW, people, have you looked at recently-released CM-Super
package of fonts (Vadim is probably aware of them ;-)? They are
autogenerated from METAFONT fonts and cover all european and cyrillic
scripts. The license is GPL, but nobody prevents us from persuading the
author, Vladimir Volovich, to change it to something compatible with X
(that's IMHO, since IANAL :).
URL is ftp://ftp.vsu.ru/pub/tex/font-packs/cm-super/ .
_________________________________________
Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov
The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics
Novosibirsk, Russia
_______________________________________________
Fonts mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
