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
