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Those Messy TrueTypes
by Ingmar Schuster, in Themes - Sat, May 4th 2002 00:00 UTC
Recently, I downloaded about 2,000 free fonts. Most of them are of
high quality, but you can easily imagine my problem: There are just
too many of them for one graphics designer. I don't have time to
browse through them all to find the one optimal for my needs.
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directly.
Those filters in gtk-dialog help a little, do they? Well, the
foundries help a little, and at least artwiz has some kind of style in
all his fonts, but what we really need are descriptive categories to
choose from. On the old themes.org, you could search for fonts by
descriptions like "Bulky-wavy", "Extreme", "Funky", and "Handwriting".
We need to be able to find fonts by these categories after they're
available to the font server.
Why not hack font-related software to use the path to the font file as
a filter rule, so you could choose to display only the fonts in
"/usr/share/fonts/bulky-wavy/"? Well, that gets ugly -- really ugly,
really quickly. A font that's "Bulky-wavy" and "Funky" would have to
be symlinked to the "funky" directory, and the more descriptions you
apply to a font, the worse it gets.
Licensing is a further complication. I have to admit that not all the
fonts I downloaded are free. Some are called "sharefonts" by the site
that hosts them; I'm supposed to erase them after a certain number of
days of use. I'd do that (I have enough fonts to choose from now), but
I don't know which those fonts are and how long I'm allowed to try
them. The site does not provide any information regarding copyright,
creator, or license. Even if it did, it'd be troublesome to get it. I
didn't download all those fonts manually, of course; I used wget. Such
information should be stored in the font itself, so you don't need to
ask the creator "What was the license again?" (if you even know who
the creator was).
The final problems relate to patents. Apple was granted three
patents in the late 80s/early 90s concerning the optimization of
TrueType rendering. These patents hinder most people from legally
using the optimizations that are provided with the font file itself in
the form of bytecode.
The clean solution for all these problems is straightforward:
We need to define a patent-free format for font files. In ogg's vein,
there has to be an open, free sample implementation. The format should
be flexible enough to store freeform tags, while some tags have to be
provided for the file to be correct. These could be, for example, a
copyright notice, a pointer to the license, and some categories the
font fits into (with standard categories defined in the file format
specification). The sample implementation should be plugged into Freetype, just as
the Freetype people seem (to me) predestined to define the format
itself.
Finally -- as we get implementations for Mac and Win32 -- this could
solve the problem "I want to use that font for my site, but no one
except me seems to have it installed".
Author's bio:
Some time ago, Ingmar
Schuster was employed in an obscure Web design company (which he
doesn't even want to link to). He recently finished high school and
will soon study some obscure literature thing and computer science.
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[Comments are disabled]
Comments
[»]
What really irritates me about fonts in X
by wettoad - May 7th 2002 12:55:59
try installing a true type font that is very cryptic and hard to read, for
instance a cursive font, with a name like "123..." Now start
anyone of a plethora of prorgrams, my favorite being Xemacs, and you get
this font on the program and you cant read anything or do anything
Someone please fix this
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cddb style scripted solution?
by Grant Stavely - May 6th 2002 15:01:59
The current alias-file solution seems most apt for your problem, it's just
not easy enough to be practical.
Why not set up some sort of foundry database that would regognize fonts by
set properties in the ttf format (or others) and respond with the alias
lines needed to fully organize one's collection? Sure a new font format
that does everything everyone needs would be wonderful but don't expect to
see it any time soon - and I think the database would make an acceptible
and adaptbible solution.
Making alias files is already scripted locally - how difficult would it be
to get some more advanced font-recognition into said script?
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METAFONT could be a starting point.
by Simon Clift - May 6th 2002 03:57:22
Donald Knuth
has
commented
on the differences between METAFONT and TrueType. Perhaps if the open
source community is looking for a patent-free system for fonts, his work
could be a basis. It is superb work, well documented, with the only noted
disadvantage being that it uses slightly more complex mathematics and is
somewhat slower.
An opportunity, perhaps, to further build on the work of a master...
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SVG format?
by Alias - May 4th 2002 19:44:00
Would it be possible to use the SVG format for creating and using fonts? I
imagine it would be a bit more CPU intensive, but it is already a defined
format.
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Re: SVG format?
by Bas Burger - May 4th 2002 22:39:24
> Would it be possible to use the SVG
> format for creating and using fonts? I
> imagine it would be a bit more CPU
> intensive, but it is already a defined
> format.
Yes it is posible...
Get batik at w3c... that will translate most ttf fonts perfectly into the
right svg tagged xml files...
I have translated many of them...
The tool is a commandline tool...
Use a batch processor to automatcily translate a whole serie...
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Re: SVG format?
by Bas Burger - May 4th 2002 22:40:48
>
> % Would it be possible to use the
> SVG
> % format for creating and using fonts?
> I
> % imagine it would be a bit more CPU
> % intensive, but it is already a
> defined
> % format.
>
>
> Yes it is posible...
> Get batik at w3c... that will
> translate most ttf fonts perfectly into
> the right svg tagged xml files...
> I have translated many of them...
>
> The tool is a commandline tool...
> Use a batch processor to automatcily
> translate a whole serie...
>
opppppppppppsssssssss not at w3c but at apache... sorry...
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Re: SVG format?
by Alias - May 4th 2002 23:11:34
>
> % Would it be possible to use the
> SVG
> % format for creating and using fonts?
> I
> % imagine it would be a bit more CPU
> % intensive, but it is already a
> defined
> % format.
>
>
> Yes it is posible...
> Get batik at w3c... that will
> translate most ttf fonts perfectly into
> the right svg tagged xml files...
> I have translated many of them...
>
> The tool is a commandline tool...
> Use a batch processor to automatcily
> translate a whole serie...
>
Excellant. Now if only X had the ability to use SVG fonts...
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Re: SVG format?
by Bas Burger - May 5th 2002 07:37:11
>
> Excellant. Now if only X had the
> ability to use SVG fonts...
>
Probably wont... your best shot is Konqueror, the KDE browser...
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Re: SVG format?
by Ste - May 6th 2002 12:20:45
>
> Excellant. Now if only X had the
> ability to use SVG fonts...
>
I wonder how hard this would be to implement as an X4.x font module.
That's what modular design is for, right? Or may be a hack to FreeType?
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Re: SVG format?
by Shawn Rutledge - Oct 24th 2002 18:43:49
> Would it be possible to use the SVG
> format for creating and using fonts? I
> imagine it would be a bit more CPU
> intensive, but it is already a defined
> format.
I think that's not a good idea for performance reasons. Well, unless you
can compile the XML into a very fast in-memory description...
It doesn't gain much for font files to be human-readable.
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Where did you get said fonts?
by Snafoo - May 4th 2002 15:44:59
I dabble in graphic design, and I'm getting tired of the 'sharefonts' and
'freefonts' packages available at sunsite.
Where did you get these 2000 fonts?
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Re: Where did you get said fonts?
by yebyen - May 4th 2002 21:42:01
> Where did you get these 2000 fonts?
>
I would also like to know... heh
--
Restating the obvious since Nineteen 'ought six!
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Re: Where did you get said fonts?
by Ingmar Schuster - May 5th 2002 05:37:58
fontz.de, though there are (as said) quite many of them
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Just use font aliases. Works already.
by ianezz - May 4th 2002 08:28:28
There is no need to reinvent the wheel (and it has already been discussed
on Freshmeat some times ago).
For the X Window System there is already a good way to organize fonts in
groups: font aliases.
In other words, you can create aliases for font names, simply by editing
the fonts.alias file in your font directory. If you want to organize them
in families, just choose appropriate names. man mkfontdir for details.
Example: a fonts.aliases containing the following row
-Funky-Helvetica\ Narrow-medium-r-condensed--*-*-*-*-p-0-iso8859-1
-Adobe-Helvetica\ Narrow-medium-r-condensed--*-*-*-*-p-0-iso8859-1
creates an alias for the Adobe Helvetica (of any size). Btw, on my system,
Adobe Helvetica in turn is itself an alias for another font (but that is
not important).
Then, do a ``xset fp rehash'', so X re-reads font configuration files.
After this, you can select the "Funky" foundry, and there are
your fonts. Simple, isn't it? :-)
Btw, this works also when the fonts are served by a remote host, which is
not the case using directory names...
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Re: Just use font aliases. Works already.
by inignoct - May 4th 2002 12:35:35
Well, this *works* and I suppose you could call it good from the standpoint
of being the only functional way of achieving this as it stands... But
isn't there something to be said for a solution which is both functional
and easy?
If I have, say, 1000 fonts, it's a huge pain to go through each and every
one to categorize them and make font aliases. Will it work? Sure, but
it's a giant expenditure of time, especially considering that if I'm going
to all that trouble I'm probly a professionial with better things to do.
Now consider that people all over the world are going through that same
process... talk about 'reinventing the wheel', here we've got thousands of
designers, artists, etc., all over the world duplicating hours and hours of
tedious grunt work, for what is still probably not the optimal solution to
the problem.
I don't claim to be a great expert in the field, but I and most people I
speak to seem to agree that Linux treats fonts in a very unintuitive way,
especially from a user standpoint. I recall in macos, all i had to do was
drop the font into my system folder and the rest was taken care of...
That's probly not the best model for linux to aim for, but from a user
standpoint it made life pretty easy.
The bottom line i guess is that, I don't have a program to point at and
say "I fixed it" but I don't think there's anything wrong with bringing up
the issue again, because I certainly don't think it's been solved yet.
Aliases are a nice workaround, but a real solution has yet to be discussed.
Perhaps we *do* need an RFC -- it doesn't hurt to bring it up.
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Re: Just use font aliases. Works already.
by Ingmar Schuster - May 5th 2002 14:53:44
> Perhaps we
> *do* need an RFC -- it doesn't hurt to
> bring it up.
That's the way to go IMHO
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Re: Just use font aliases. Works already.
by DontTreadOnMe - May 4th 2002 15:40:09
> There is no need to reinvent the wheel
> (and it has already been discussed on
> Freshmeat some times ago).
>
> For the X Window System there is
> already a good way to organize fonts in
> groups: font aliases.
You've just outlined an excellent method whereby the Author's suggestion
can be realized. However, it is really unrealistic to expect users to wade
through 2000+ fonts categorizing each one in this fashion, and as it stands
wading through fonts in the traditional method <i>is</i>
cumbersome, sufficiently so that many people avoid changing around their
fonts unless absolutely necessary simply because of the time involved in
finding what one is looking for.
So I would suggest that those who know something about fonts, like
graphics designers, begin collaborating on a fonts aliases file that could,
perhaps someday, be distributed with XFree itself, but at least in the
interim would be something one could download and install, thereby making
fonts easier to manage and easier to find.
One of the real pleasantries of GNU/Linux and X is the frequency with
which problems like this find simple, elegant solutions like the one you
outlined to problems such as the author outlined. :)
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Re: Just use font aliases. Works already.
by Ingmar Schuster - May 5th 2002 06:15:42
While I really missed aliases here, they are, just as my ridiculous
directorys, a non-permanent solution. While it's possible for X, fonts
floating around in the internet usually don't come with aliases and aliases
don't have much sense on Win32 (dunno about MacOsX).
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Linux developers need more cooperation with experts
by Cinek - May 4th 2002 03:47:41
When You look at Linux, I have the impression, it's been only developed by
simple hackers like we find them here on freshmeat.
I have already noticed that developing an OS needs cooperation with
experts in other disciplines. Especially graphics designers should get to
know how the development works on our beloved OS and should be encouraged
to send their creations to developer, which mostly make only
"dummy-pictures" (which look ugly) but work.
When a newbie takes a look at our window-managers, he is scared away by
his first impression. And the first impression is important! (Yes, even
Gnome and KDE with all their themes are still ugly, in my opinion. And this
is the only reason why simple people, who just want to use the computer for
fun don't like it.)
Now it comes out that more and more simple things are unstructred. Unix
has got a fixed structure, but Linux is NOT Unix, we can change it. You can
make many things more intuitive, so newbies like the OS more. The best way
to do that is dialog with experts on a certain topic, before designing
wrong architectures.
(Sorry for getting a bit off-topic here, but the problems are somehow
related.)
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Re: Linux developers need more cooperation with experts
by beatbuster - May 4th 2002 08:08:01
and i was wondering why people don't use linux...
thanks for telling us
:)
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Re: Linux developers need more cooperation with experts
by Anna Merikin - May 4th 2002 11:04:39
> When You look at Linux, I have the
> impression, it's been only developed by
> simple hackers like we find them here on
> freshmeat. You can make
> many things more intuitive, so newbies
> like the OS more. The best way to do
> that is dialog with experts on a certain
> topic, before designing wrong
> architectures.
>
That's why WordPerfect still has the market for legal word-processing
software to itself. That was their focus group, apparently, back in the DOS
4.x series, and their features for that profession continue to this day.
The same holds true for the early Lotus spread, and I remember how long it
took them to recognize managers needed to generate virtual `what if'
scenarios that wouldn't change the saved results. (Duh!) I am a writer so I
need a professional wp that does what a good editor does easily with pen on
paper (copy editing markup). Some recommend LyX or even TeTex, but those
are set up for university pubs, not for commercial presses and there are no
features (del sentence, replace phrase, move paragraph down four, etc.) for
editing, just for typesetting.
Programmers need to to know intimately how professionals do their jobs in
order to make software that does things according to the customs and needs
of the trade. Otherwise, computers will remain toys for hobbyists and
university students.
This is what makes the Gimp, for example, so difficult for me to learn; it
bears no similarity to the processes I am familiar with in commercial image
processing. It is a bit like trying to draw in POVray! Although it is an
exceptional tool, it will never replace Photoshop for exactly that reason
-- it flies against professional convention.
For another example, I often use XV to crop images quickly. In an art
department of an ad agency, we used two right-angled cardboard templates
and put it over the image, adjusting its size and placement until we found
what we liked. XV tries to simulate this by making an expanding box with
the cursor through the mouse. Although this expands and contracts like the
real-life cropper, it cannot be moved randomly over the image easily at the
same time and it does not make the part of the image cropped disappear or
be blocked by the edge of the cursor-box. Why?
As far as fonts are concerned, print them out a page for each and keep
them in a hard-copy book. The test text can include the information you
need to find the alias and location of what you decide to use. For now,
that seems to be a workaround until some programmer teams up with a good,
experienced graphics designer to make a program that is truly usable, not
just a superb technical exercise.
PS: I have already made the macros I need for WP-5.1, which works fine
under DOSemu. I refuse to learn to program Emacs macros or WP8 to do the
same....so there is no need to suggest this option. Once I edit on DOS' WP,
I make the page up (if needed) on Linux WP8 (Thanks, Corel.)
--
I feel strongly about things and call it thinking.
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Re: Linux developers need more cooperation with experts
by MarkoNo5 - May 4th 2002 13:19:18
% presses and there are no features (del
> sentence, replace phrase, move paragraph
> down four, etc.) for editing, just for
> typesetting.
Ever heard about vim ? I seems horrible at first, but when you get to
know it, it's a great editor.
It has all the features you name.
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Re: Linux developers need more cooperation with experts
by Anna Merikin - May 4th 2002 19:28:12
Yeah, it came with my first Linux, SuSE 5.0. I'll keep wp51, which I
already know. I just can't deal with a text editor like vim. I copyedit a
60-character line; wp breaks this line perfectly all the time on the
screen. I can't imagine how to make vim do that...I didn't learn how to
quit the damn program (keep hitting escape until it beeps, then type :q ?)
for months. Every time it came up as the default editor, I had to go to
another terminal to kill it! Then I figured out to use pico as an alias,
and life was a little better.
Note I am not a computer student nor a professional. I am a writer who now
uses a computer instead of a typewriter, cause who ever heard of a
typewriter that can copy and paste text from the internet or from reference
and research tools on CD-ROM and then write original material from these
sources, edit it, proof it, choose its page makeup, preview it, and
repaginate everything automatically if an error is found in the first page
of a final submission?
Wordperfect for DOS is becoming a little like the old Royal iron
typewriters of the thirties were for professional writers: irreplaceable
and a badge of honor -- just like vim is for programmers, I'm sure.
And that's my (and the OP's) point. There needs to be tools already made
or home computers' will be limited to web surfing and those who do homework
or who work at home.
--
I feel strongly about things and call it thinking.
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Re: Linux developers need more cooperation with experts
by gurensan - Jul 21st 2002 22:58:45
It sounds like you're looking for a new font selection
dialog box - this would come from the desktop environ
you'd be running. For example, the font selection box
under KDE wouldn't work if only twm were installed,
but it sounds doable. One could have a different tab
representing each of the char sets - symbol, serif, etc.
Too bad I'm a crappy programmer, but it's a good idea!
> Yeah, it came with my first Linux, SuSE
> 5.0. I'll keep wp51, which I already
> know. I just can't deal with a text
> editor like vim. I copyedit a
> 60-character line; wp breaks this line
> perfectly all the time on the screen. I
> can't imagine how to make vim do
> that...I didn't learn how to quit the
> damn program (keep hitting escape until
> it beeps, then type :q ?) for months.
> Every time it came up as the default
> editor, I had to go to another terminal
> to kill it! Then I figured out to use
> pico as an alias, and life was a little
> better.
>
> Note I am not a computer student nor a
> professional. I am a writer who now uses
> a computer instead of a typewriter,
> cause who ever heard of a typewriter
> that can copy and paste text from the
> internet or from reference and research
> tools on CD-ROM and then write original
> material from these sources, edit it,
> proof it, choose its page makeup,
> preview it, and repaginate everything
> automatically if an error is found in
> the first page of a final submission?
>
> Wordperfect for DOS is becoming a little
> like the old Royal iron typewriters of
> the thirties were for professional
> writers: irreplaceable and a badge of
> honor -- just like vim is for
> programmers, I'm sure.
>
> And that's my (and the OP's) point.
> There needs to be tools already made or
> home computers' will be limited to web
> surfing and those who do homework or who
> work at home.
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Make a font book
by FattMattP - May 4th 2002 02:06:10
Make a font book. That's what you get when you buy commercial fonts. You
look through the font book to see which one you want. They are organized
by serif, sans-serif, decorative and symbol. Sometimes you'll see more
categorization.
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Re: Make a font book
by Goose - May 4th 2002 10:40:56
But wouldn't it be so much nicer if the font selection dialogue acted like
your font book? This would be easier than a small font selection box with
scroll bar made completely useless by the simple volume of items listed.
What if you don't plan on using Frutiger Condensed or the entire ClearlyU
fontset in your project? It would be much easier simply not to see these
and only have to deal with the two fonts you are actually using.
> Make a font book. That's what you get
> when you buy commercial fonts. You look
> through the font book to see which one
> you want. They are organized by serif,
> sans-serif, decorative and symbol.
> Sometimes you'll see more
> categorization.
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Re: Make a font book
by Yazz D. Atlas - May 4th 2002 22:24:54
> Make a font book. That's what you get when you buy %commercial
fonts. You look through the font book to see %which one you want. They
are organized by serif,
>sans-serif, decorative and symbol. Sometimes you'll see %more
categorization.
I uses gfontview to
generate my Font Books. But it would be neat if you were able to rearange
the listing to fit your needs right form the tool....
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Re: Make a font book
by raettchen3 - Sep 3rd 2002 11:58:11
There's a solution:
www.gesindel.de
There you find my GPL-Software for sorting, previewing, renaming,
organizing,... TrueType _and_ PostScript-Fonts.
It uses perl and MySQL for creating databases, apache and php for a
webbased gui and ImageMagick for generating previews.
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Re: Make a font book
by Mark - Jun 27th 2003 03:00:11
> There's a solution:
>
> www.gesindel.de
>
> There you find my GPL-Software for
> sorting, previewing, renaming,
> organizing,... TrueType _and_
> PostScript-Fonts.
>
> It uses perl and MySQL for creating
> databases, apache and php for a webbased
> gui and ImageMagick for generating
> previews.
>
An interesting idea, but I don't think I'll be installing MySQL, Apache
and php just to see my fonts. If you can come up with another interface
and storage idea this may be a viable idea for the masses. The required
software load is a bit to heavy IMHO.
cheers.
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Re: Make a font book
by Basurero - Jul 19th 2004 04:15:01
>
> I uses gfontview to generate my Font
> Books.
>
It's a nice program, but sooooo outdated. I don't have the necessary
programming skills to hack on it myself. I tried it out, but it doesn't
print the pages correctly, after the first half page it prints random
chars.
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