Paul Tremblay wrote:
So what exactly is a font? I thought a font was more like a data file.
Well, a program is a data file, interpreted by the processor. You know, there's always a level where the distinction between programs and data is blurry. In terms of copyright, the distinction doesn't matter all that much anyway.
I thought the rendering of the font was done by the program. Also, what exactly is hinting? Is that not some technique to make a font look better?
It is a technique which makes scaled down glyphs look better. Remember, TrueType fonts are used to generate glyph bitmaps for arbitrary glyph sizes. Hints are used to change the glyph locally to minimize artifacts caused by mapping the shape to pixels. For example take the upper case letter "T". If the stroke thickness gets down to the range of a single pixel, the joint of the two lines of the T might start looking more black and somewhat like a knot. A hint causes the renderer to lighten the zone up.
If a font is a set of data (as opposed to a program), it seems in the interest of the open source community to develop some type of open font format.
Why? The TTF and OTF formats are already open. The problem are the software patents related to the bytecode interpreter which requires font *rendering programs* to ask for a license. See also http://www.freetype.org/patents.html
[snip search for free fonts]
Ghostscript and KDE come with completely free fonts, and I've seen TTF conversion for them. I'm just too lazy right know to search through their distributions for the actual font names and fedd this into Google. I als vaguely remember that the Lucid TTF included in Sun's JDK (perhaps Linux only) doesn't have license restrictions.
Just realised that I have been unsubscribed from fop-user for some time thanks to the flood of spam and spurious mail delivery error messages. Grumble, grumble...
The American Mathematical Society has the copyright on the Computer Modern fonts. http://www.ams.org/tex/type1-fonts.html
These are available in Type 1 format. In addition, there are AMS-developed fonts for mathematics.
Peter -- Peter B. West <http://www.powerup.com.au/~pbwest/resume.html>
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