Mark Hachman at Extreme Tech saw our report on Microsoft removing the commonly-used free web fonts from its download site and called Microsoft for comment. Microsoft denies that the move was aimed at any particular Free Software users, despite the fact that it happened on Linux World’s opening day. They claim that the free fonts were being “abused.” Poor, poor fonts. They just couldn’t protect themselves. See more at Extreme Tech
I just checked the international home for abused fonts….Verdana and Georgia just checked in…
Microsoft has also found that the downloads were being abused – repackaged, modified and shipped with commercial products in violation of the EULA [licensing agreement].”
To honest and fair one has got to agree that many comercial software abused the (font) package and the download possibility. And that Microsoft invested and paid lots of money and thefonts are their property so they can do whatever they want with it.
There never was and will never be such thing as high-quality launches and dinners for free! 🙂
However, this was being done in the hope that Microsoft would finnaly release this charismatic fonts to the public but .. turns out they were quite choerent with themselves and they removed the downloadable and abused (poor things) fonts.
With professional font software for Windows (fontograher? I don’t know) how long would it take to cleanroom recreate every font in that MS package?
1. Print out all the MS fonts at very high points on a laser printer.
2. Remove the fonts from your computer.
3. Recreate the fonts from the printout, i.e. Using only your eye to create the copied font. That is cleanroom for fonts.
Now, I would never bother as I would just take a Windows disk for about 5 minutes and copy all the fonts. I don’t even have to a agree to a license agreement to do that. In fact, maybe that is a better idea. Everyone can send their old Windows 98 disk to cheapbytes.com. When you need some fonts, order a disk for $2. Send it back when you are finished.
Seriously, this problem has many solutions. It won’t be long now before there is a good set of open fonts.
Shouldn’t W3C develop a set of standard web fonts? Fonts are one of teh most important part of the web experience. Seems crazy to standardize on a commercial entities offering.
I tellya, there’s nothing that makes my blood boil more than child pornography, paedophilia and abused fonts…
Microsoft the damn bastards are once again trying to unrightfully hurt the great opensource/free software systems by _refusing_ to give away fonts for free! This makes the evil of Microsoft far more obvious, I suggest a boycott until Microsoft does not only give fonts away for free again, but also send out Bill Gates personally to install them for us. It is obviously some kind of conspiracy since they removed them at the first day of the LinuxWorld too.
People have looked really really stupid over this issue really. If there is any conspiracy behind removing the fonts it is surely to make the open source people look unthankful and childish.
When will the madness end?!?!?!?!?
I dont think they are being ungrateful, nor unthankful, maybe a bit childish though. I dont use verdana on my home system, but i do at work, its an awesome font, and i do wish i had it at home. They were giving it for free, so people started using it on webpages (very few GOOD fonts worked nicely on all platforms, verdana did). Its like getting people hooke on crack, the first hit is free, soon enough they will start charging for it.
People say that it takes years to develop good fonts, well it also takes years to develop a good operating system, but the open source community seems to be doing good at that (and i dont just mean linux). I think there’s a huge demand for it, i’d like more fonts (i think i would only need my fingers to list the ones i have), so i think it should be doable.
I second that one. It’s a real important part of the web experience!!!
I hate “me too” comments, but I have to give one to this idea. W3C fonts would be a very good thing!
The font issue is quite critical, and can make the difference between a system that is useable and one that isn’t. The dist companies should pull together and solve this once-and-for-all. Maybe they can hire people in Russia, or India, or China, or whereever, and cut costs that way. It should be doable. How many people does Redhat employ? What about Sun, who is planning to sell linux workstations? What about Big blue? Surely, they would know a thing or two about fonts!
Maybe they can hire people in Russia, or India, or China, or whereever, and cut costs that way
Think about what you just said, linux_baby. Do you have no respect for human dignity. Maybe your employer should relocate to Russia, India, or China to cut costs THAT way.
I hate it when I go to buy something and I realize it was created by abused fonts working in sweatshops, for low wages, in horrible conditions. If there is a crisis in this world, it’s abused fonts!
actually, the w3c seems to be moving away from the use of standard fonts. In fact, they discourage the use of explicit font names in html or css, instead a “family” is supposed to be used. The idea is that you can use any font you want as your “sans serif” font, instead of having a web designer foist Verdana or Tahoma (my personal favorite) on you.
So, I don’t think the w3c would ever create its own set of standard fonts. Linux/Open Source developers will have to do that on their own.
> Think about what you just said,
> linux_baby. Do you have no respect
> for human dignity
I’m lost on this one, can you explain a bit more? What has this got to do with human dignity? People are saying fonts are expensive to make, and linux companies may not afford the cost, and I am suggesting using labour from parts of the world where the economy is different, and cost may be cheaper. Did you not know that a can of soda is more expensive in NewYork than in Moscow?
> Maybe your employer should
> relocate to Russia, India,
> or China to cut costs THAT way.
Sure, why not? We do sell stuff to China, Russia, and India, so what would be the big deal if jobs are created in those places?
W3C fonts would be a very good thing!
Come on, are you serious ?
They don’t have enough money to buy önë high-quality set of TrueType fonts from a foundry. Enthusiast font making will not have minimal quality.
Must be a foundry with years of experience and some skilled professional teams to achieve a reasonable font quality.~
Some people will say that Lucidux font (and others) is a good one ?? so they don’t see anything wrong;
bulls??t!! 🙂
Of course, good web fonts are the most important but I never saw a joined effort towards on OpenSource; people tend always to look the other way (to debug C code); there is even an attempt to put AntiAliased (Type1 fonts) fonts on XFree when there isn’t a group of TrueType fonts available; I mean people on Open Source-Linux always start some cutting edge project when they haven’t finished the “legacy” project that was on the going. I really dislike this aspect of Open Source efforts since they don’t never produce something that will last for sometime. Centrally coordinated Open Source efforts with some comercial back-up that doesn’t let the project to go down the drain (like Mozilla teams) seem to achieve better results. The uggly/jagged fonts need a solution of that kind.
Once upon a time there were the “Mozilla fonts” (this are still around, I think) but it stopped and didn’t got the high-quality that Georgia, Thaoma, TrebuchetMS and Verdana have. Anyway these were (almost) only some Linux-Mozilla adapted scalled fonts.
Maybe Netscape and Mozilla could take this centrally coordenated effort on their shoulders and create another OSS standard with W3C. It’s a money problem (like always).
Given that almost all font usage is limited to Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, and Courier, you can assemble a basic collection of fonts for < $100. For example, Arial is around $22 at monotype.com
>>actually, the w3c seems to be moving away from the use of standard fonts. In fact, they discourage the use of explicit font names in html or css, instead a “family” is supposed to be used. The idea is that you can use any font you want as your “sans serif” font, instead of having a web designer foist Verdana or Tahoma (my personal favorite) on you. <<
css2 allows you to use any font on your page by having the font face you want in one of the directories on your site. but ive never been able to get it to work. i guess browsers still need to catch up on that part.
While it is legal to make one-off copies of fonts it’s not as easy as just printing them out, scanning the images in, and tracing them. Anyone can do that.
The hinting, the kerning pairs, the overexageration of design elements at large sizes so that the font at normal sizes looks correct, the baseline leveling of all letters except for those that intentionally need to be adjusted, etc… These items are what makes a font “correct”. The average user can not do these things properly.
Fontographer, while a helpful (and quite dated) tool will not do all of the minutia of making a font automatically, either.
Proper font design is an art and only font artists will make high quality fonts.
explicit font names in html or css, instead a “family” is supposed to be used.
Maybe I´m a little wrong but, that {font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Geneve ; font-size: 10px }, is only related with the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Mozilla isn’t good with CSS but KDE-Konqueror manages CSS (almost) quite nicely.
CSS was around for sometime (1996, I think) but only started being used via the push to XHTML recently (2000, I think, if my memory doesn’t fail me).
Font-families allows you (among many thing, like saving you time on layout and thypography) to especify a family (Serif, Sans-serif, cursive) with *several* (and not only one) font names belonging to distintc platforms (Arial-win32, Helvetica-Unix/Linux, Geneve-QNX) which is very nice if you want your page to look exactly has you wanted in the first place (like it happens with OSNews website :-).
Believe me, if you had to write or construct/build many web pages/forms on a single day you would appreciate the availability of good and free web fonts where you didn’t had to have concerns with font compatibility and could concentrate on content and scripts.
Good thing CSS appeared, but a pletora of high-quality web fonts would be even better.
People are saying fonts are expensive to make, and linux companies may not afford the cost, and I am suggesting using labour from parts of the world where the economy is different, and cost may be cheaper. Did you not know that a can of soda is more expensive in NewYork than in Moscow?
Argghh I hate Americans with this kind of narrowed, stupid and arrogant perspective!
Do you think you are better then the rest of the world so that you can pay a miserable salary to a Russian or a Eastern European or a Chinese ? (they have to pay for their pop-soda too, sucker).
Narrowed Americans should all go to hell!!
This a great opprotunity for the Open Source Movement….we no longer need anything Microsoft, and by judging from the strong dislike for the software giant, all should be happy that we will no longer use MS Fonts….Open source community come together and CREATE something better….after all, that is a great strength of Open Source…
>>Argghh I hate Americans with this kind of narrowed, stupid and arrogant perspective!
Do you think you are better then the rest of the world so that you can pay a miserable salary to a Russian or a Eastern European or a Chinese ? (they have to pay for their pop-soda too, sucker).
Narrowed Americans should all go to hell!!<<
do you really think if roles were reversed it would be any different? if mexico had a better economy than the US dont you think their factories would move there to better their bottom line? its all about money in the end. good or bad one person or the other.
Yes, Yes we do think we are better that the rest of the world. After all, who has the strongest economy, who has the most powerful military, who has the most innovation and inventions????USA…NO the rest of the world can go to hell….
sounds like being a fontographer is a very lucrative job. i wish i was more artistic. oh well.
> I hate Americans with this kind of narrowed, stupid and
> arrogant perspective!Do you think you are better then the
> rest of the world so that you can pay a miserable salary to > a Russian or a Eastern European or a Chinese ?
First of all, I am NOT american. And no, I would never ever suggest that anybody anywhere be paid a miserable salary, so
That being said, the value of labour is never objective. It obviously depends on where you live. A programmer working in Silicon valley would generally earn more than a programmer working in Arizona. For the same reason, a programmer in the US would probably earn more than a programmer in Bombay or Vietnam. It isn’t that the poeple in Silicon valley think they are better than those in Arizona. It has something to do with supply, demand, and the local economy.
If you are a mexican programmer, being employed by an american company that pays mexican wages instead of American wages would be preferable to NOT being employed at all. Please do not start an unnecessary flame war.
Come on, are you serious? They don’t have enough money to buy önë high-quality set of TrueType fonts from a foundry.
I thought W3 was a consortium of commercial companies. Are fonts really that expensive?
you made my point better than I. ^^ thats all i meant.
Yes, Yes we do think we are better that the rest of the world. After all, who has the strongest economy, who has the most powerful military, who has the most innovation and inventions????USA…NO the rest of the world can go to hell…..
—————-
Excellent idea. Start by taking all the immigrants out of America and see where that leaves you.
actually, the MS spokesperson in the article didn’t say that the *fonts* were abused — instead it was:
…Microsoft has also found that the downloads were being abused – repackaged, modified and shipped with commercial products in violation of the EULA
So, it’s really the downloads that are in the sweatshops.
Seriously though, why isn’t the free software community using metafont fonts? They’re scalable, high-quality, well-documented, free, and even designed by the master jedi himself (Knuth).
It’d be pretty cool to read osnews in computer modern.
I don’t want to flame people.
You will have to excuse me. Sorry.
First of all, I am NOT american. And no, I would never ever suggest that anybody anywhere be paid a miserable salary, so
One thing I’m sure: you are NOT Russian, Eastern European nor Chinese~.
“Of course, good web fonts are the most important but I never saw a joined effort towards on OpenSource; people tend
always to look the other way (to debug C code); ”
You can’t expect programmers to turn into designers just because there
is now a need for good designers in the Linux community. Nor can you
expect designers to work for free in the same way – there are many
people employed by universities and colleges in IT work who have time
for some free programming. There is not an equivalent population of
subsidised designers.
Only a very small subgroup of designers have skills in font design
(remember we are talking about text fonts, not fun fonts).
<Excellent idea. Start by taking all the immigrants out of America and see where that leaves you.>
I consider immigrants who are legal (i.e. u.s. citezens, visa, etc) to be American…even though visas don’t make you a citezen it shows that you really are American at heart…being American has a level is idealism, because we are not a “nation” by it’s raw definition, which is a group of people bound by a commonality (i.e. race, religion, etc.). What does make the US a nation is our ideals and concepts of government and freedom…now as far as ILLEGAL immigrants and other nations that blast us for helping the world, that is the real target of my post…Isn’t this fun?
Although a font containing the range of “a-z/A-Z/0-9” would be cheap, any international font would need to be unicode compliant, and there you have about 64,000 characters to recreate per font. Hence the cost.
Oh.. and Mozilla has much better support of CSS than Konquerer does. Konquerer is more forgiving with errors than Mozilla, and I suspect you’re doing it wrong.
You can’t expect programmers to turn into designers just because there is now a need for good designers in the Linux community. Nor can you expect designers to work for free in the same way –
OK, but it’s not a need that appeared now-today-. I started to install and run Linux, at least 3 years ago, nothing has changed up to today on this subject.
I know that only a few designers know the tricks of glyphing and font making.
But, I maintain that Linux representatives never cared much about important aspects of a working environment (GUI). If Apple and Windows care about this aspect (text/screen fonts of high quality) Linux representatives and users will have to think a little about it too.
How to solve it ?
Gathering effort$ and contact professional font foundries seems the only way (even ask Microsoft – I mean a consortium made by the emergent Multinational companies that are getting into Linux, IBM, HP, etc – if they want to trade their widely used fonts – sacrilege
.
Linux is not a very lucrative bussiness but some Linux related companies (HP, IBM, Oracle, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, United Linux, etc.) could start thinking about it. Why do they give some hardware and funds to Gnome and KDE projects and not some joint-effort to a set of text/screen fonts if it’s needed since years back ?
Oh.. and Mozilla has much better support of CSS than Konquerer does. Konquerer is more forgiving with errors than Mozilla, and I suspect you’re doing it wrong.
That’s your opinion. Try to change the color of the scroll bar on Mozilla with a CSS. I know there’s much on CSS. Maybe you were refering to downloadable fonts via CSS ?
Try to make a CSS on a table where the title will be Helvetica bold 12 px and the table text will be Lucida regular 10 px then surf the page on Mozilla and on Konqueror and on Opera. You will see if you are right or wrong then.
Oh.. and Mozilla has much better support of CSS than Konquerer does. Konquerer is more forgiving with errors than Mozilla, and I suspect you’re doing it wrong.
That’s your opinion. Try to change the color of the scroll bar on Mozilla with a CSS. I know there’s much on CSS. Maybe you were refering to downloadable fonts via CSS ?
Try to make a CSS for a table where the text title inside will be Helvetica bold 12 px and the table text will be Lucida regular 10 px then surf the page on Mozilla, on Konqueror and on Opera. You will see if you are right or wrong then.
Personally, I’m of the belief that fonts are incredibly important; nothing makes or breaks an interface like good text, in my opinion (after all, it’s what you look at all day long). And I think the major points here are valid: designing good fonts is very difficult, and those capable of doing so are in limited supply and are unwilling to work for free.
So why doesn’t someone set up a donation system, and then use that money to pay a professional to create some? People are (apparently) willing to donate money for all sorts of wacky things (who was that guy who pledged more than $1000 for a BeOS port of Black & White?). I imagine such an initiative could garner at least $40,000 or so. Then all open-source OSes–or anyone, for that matter–could use them, and Linux/etc. would have yet one less hurdle to mainstream acceptance. I’m sure that if Slashdot or someone similarly famous pushed for this that a lot of people would join in.
(Keep in mind that I really have no idea how much it would cost to pay someone to make a good set, so please forgive me if it turns out to be unfeasible.)
Sorry, I thought you were talking about standardised CSS. The scrollbar styling isn’t part of CSS 1 or 2.
I tried your example and it worked as expected. What results are you seeing?
Consider that one place where Linux truly sucks is in how fonts look. Even with recent efforts at adding anti-aliasing to Linux desktops, they still look “primitve” when compared to Windows or Mac.
The free software community has little or no way of producing high-quality fonts. It may look simple to the uninitiated, but it takes considerable time and effort to produce a high-quality, hinted, attractive font. And typography isn’t a skill some 15yo can pick up in a week, like Perl or VB hacking…
I’ve worked the publishing business since the late 80s, and quality fonts are a must for certain applications. If Linux doesn’t have pretty fonts, Linux won’t sell in certain markets — Microsoft knows this, which is why they pulled their “free” fonts. Call it a competitive advantage.
If “free” software is going to succeed in the long run, it must stop living in the dark ages of command lines and start worrying about the nice little features that make users happy.
But then again, free software isn’t about users, is it?
give all my M$FT Windoze fonts a good beating with a rubber hose and then copy them all to a ftp server and give all of them away to EVERYBODY!!!
free abused M$FT fonts for all!!!
free the fonts, i like mine spanked…
By chicobaud:
“One thing I’m sure: you are NOT Russian, Eastern European nor Chinese~.”
Well, I live here in the Republic of China, and guess what? We export our low-end jobs to other countries because it’s much cheaper than paying our own people. For local, low-paid menial jobs (like English language technical writing, factory work and babysitters) we import foreigners. And guess what? They are grateful.
now as far as ILLEGAL immigrants and other nations that blast us for helping the world, that is the real target of my post…Isn’t this fun?
————-
What most patriotic people often miss is that American foreign policy is run by corporate interests, and America is far from what I’d call “helping the world”, rather, it helps itself, first and foremost, all under the guise of helping the world. Atrocities are routinely hidden from the media, and/or heavily glossed over. Decades of self-serving actions in foreign lands have shown that.
Of course, being patriots, most feel they can never love their country but question their government and their actions in the same breath, especially after Sept 11. And now, more than ever, the American people need to be questioning their government and their supposed “in the interests of the people” actions.
You come across to me as a blind patriot, brainwashed into thinking America is an innocent player, while the ‘evil’ bastards overseas have no cause for complaint, but just do it to pick on the ‘big buy’. Correct me if I’m wrong, and maybe read the excellent post below if you feel like it.
http://www.dangerous.com/10-01-01.htm
You come across to me as a blind patriot, brainwashed into thinking America is an innocent player, while the ‘evil’ bastards overseas have no cause for complaint, but just do it to pick on the ‘big buy’.
Big buy = big guy. Typo.
Who are you replying to?
How do they plan to enforce this?
Why not just COPY and USE them? Who cares about agreement anyway? While everyone could gather and recreate these fonts, if everyone instead just fucked the licence agreement and used these fonts everywhere around, now that would make MS say ‘nevermind’. The problem is, people still seem tied to EULAs… Okay, now probably there are small companies who would really lose from the piracy of their products, but not MS. Come on, what will be next?
So why do you people just skip this idea?
Yes, Yes we do think we are better that the rest of the world. After all, who has the strongest economy, who has the most powerful military, who has the most innovation and inventions????USA…NO the rest of the world can go to hell….
China might overtake Japan as the second strongest economy in a decade. Shortly later, it could take the top stand. China is also spending a lot of money ramping up their military, and with the amount of personnel they have – heck, in 2 decades They would be the strongest military power. As for innovation and invention…. (can’t stop laughing).
In his statement about W3C Fonts, Chris is exactly right.
W3C does recommend that you use a generic font-family instead of specifying a font. I saw this yesterday when I validated a css file. The validator suggested changing my font-specific markup (Arial) to a non-specific one.
As for MS’ fonts, MS has every right to stop offering them. BSD, GNU/Linux, and BeOS users have no right to complain.
I’m as political as the next person (I’m a Libertarian), but let’s save it for political forums, not OSNews, okay?
As for the fonts, I think it would be a very good thing to develop free fonts and stop relying on MS’s freebies. If there are no “open source font designers”, are there at least any open-source font editor programs? Why not? If a half-way decent program is out there, I’m sure there’s bound to be a few people who would work on developing fonts, and eventually, even if it was only through trial-and-error, we would have some decent, free fonts.
I always used and still use the Helvetica font on BSD to surf the web, and it does a good job. Don’t know what all the fuzz is about.
tso,
I agree. Mozilla works great on NetBSD and XFree 4.2, in my experience. Perhaps the only thing I wish the XFree people would do is simplify adding fonts.
One good thing about BeOS, Windows, and MacOS is that adding fonts is as simple as putting them in a directory. I hope that X will be as easy one day.
Why not just COPY and USE them? Who cares about agreement anyway?
Part of me can’t believe I’m bothering to reply to this post, but here goes: If Red Hat, etc. start distributing fonts illegally, they’ll enjoy prompt destruction as the lawyers (rightly) set in. If they ship ugly, bad fonts, customers won’t like the system (and saying “just copy the fonts from Windows” is a far less than adequate solution–that requires owning Windows and, worse, effort which should be needless). If the out-of-the-box presentation is poor, the product will not sell well with the general public. Period.
You can’t expect customers to do a lot of work just to make the most basic aspects of a system functional.
So why do you people just skip this idea?
Because it’s idiotic, unfeasible, and illegal.
anyone have any old printer driver Cdroms, take a look in it and search thru it, there is a good chance there are some TrueType font on it…
About two years ago on my LUG mailing list (which has several Red Hat employees lurking at any one time. I live in NC) I mentioned that the $650 million Red Hat spent on Cygnus and the $30 million they spent on wirespeed would have been better used for purchasing a couple sets of high-quality TrueType fonts that could be distributed freely. Most of the people on my LUG’s list blew me off, and one of the Red Hat guys proclaimed that the Cygnus and Wirespeed were very important purchases. Maybe they were, but the second you crawl out of your server closet into the light of the desktop, readable font is far more important than an efficient compiler or some web-service/embedded crud. The way I figure it, I’m about two years ahead of most of the linux community in the common sense department.
The problem is that the talent and foresight of the linux technical community does not extend to developing a sustainable desktop infrastructure, and when end-user needs aren’t being met the linux technical community complains about such and such company (insert Microsoft/Apple/other reference here) having money to hire usability specialists, typeface designers, whatever. Funny, the open source people were able to produce an OS for $0. A webserver for $0. What does this say about the values that the open-source community has?
I applaud Microsoft’s decision to try to sink linux by taking away the free fonts; it forces the linux developer community to learn how to swim. It’s time they are forced to put value in things other than kernels, compilers, and webservers. There is a solution to the font problem: a kernel hacker, a dozen typography books and a reasonably-priced cattle prod for several hours a day.
… That’s free as in beer.
The EULA allows you to do so. Here’s an extract:
=====
* Reproduction and Distribution. You may reproduce and distribute an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT; provided that each copy shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of this EULA. Copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone basis or included as part of your own product.
=====
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ for one, is
re-distributing the fonts.
“That’s your opinion. Try to change the color of the scroll bar on Mozilla with a CSS”
That is a Microsoft CSS ‘Extenstion’.. It’s not part of the w3c standard.