- From: Clive Bruton <clive@typonaut.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 24 Feb 98 19:43:45 +0000
- To: <www-font@w3.org>
Michael Emmel wrote at 24/02/98 6:31 pm >I have ranted once on this issue but the important thing is not so much >free fonts >as a good set of standard fonts that are universally available. >The natural conclusion is that they mush be free. If there is another way to >answer this that >is acceptable to the font industry it would be nice. The way to answer this that is "acceptable to the font industry" is the way it is already done. Individuals may decide to freely distribute their work, OS or hardware manufacturers may decide to licence and distribute faces with their products, or MS may decide it's philanthropy week and here are another bunch of free fonts. That's it. I might also address the implication of the "font industry" as some lumbering giant, it isn't, I'd be surpirsed if more than 500 people were employed in design and production of type *world wide*. > >Plus from what I can tell there is no motivation in the font industry to >allow such standardization. End users don't want standardisation, they want all the fonts in the world. > >And one last comment on "free" software and the font industry crying about >hard it is to make good fonts. > >Guess how many man hours have gone into linux and other free projects for >the benefit >of the computer industry. Free software cost's its creators a lot of time and >effort and money. >I hope that everyone in the font industry that cries about the hard work put >into font design uses no free >software. This would include X windows. Was that free work put in by corporations, or by individuals? As most people working in the "type industry" will be using Macs or PCs they certainly won't be using too many pieces of "free" software (ie where the source code is available), and I doubt that many of them have much of an idea about what X windows may be (the X-Files screen saver perhaps?) > >The reluctance of the font industry to contribute because of the work >involved in font creation is nonsense. With this attitude there would be no >gcc linux emacs X11 or Unix as we know it today. It isn't just the work involved (in the technology), there's also the design factor, type doesn't grow on trees, someone has to design it. That could well be a lengthy process in itself. > >Having said this the font industries vigorous attempts to keep font >technology closed smacks of simple attempts to maintain the current status >quo. Mike, get a life, the formats of every popular font format on the planet are freely available, how the hell does that keep font technology closed? If you want free fonts, you go make them. I think Todd also made some very good points on this issue. -- Clive
Received on Tuesday, 24 February 1998 14:47:32 UTC