Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
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Fedora is debating dropping the storied Liberation font family from its distribution in favor of a fork. Liberation was one of the highest-profile open fonts, but it has languished since its initial release. Licensing issues were part of the problem, but so was the subtler disconnect of Liberation's origin as a commissioned work from a proprietary company, without an interest in working with the community. But the pressures of internationalization means the community has long sought a replacement; one that it can continue to develop.
Liberation through the ages
Liberation was released in 2007 by Red Hat, who had commissioned the designs from the commercial foundry Ascender Corporation. The initial set consisted of three fonts — Liberation Sans, Liberation Serif, and Liberation Mono — specifically designed to have the same metrics as the proprietary Monotype fonts Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New, respectively. That meant that every character in Liberation would be the exact same height and width as its counterpart in the proprietary font, and Liberation could serve as a "drop in" replacement without disturbing line breaks or pagination. In 2010, Oracle donated a fourth typeface to Liberation: Liberation Sans Narrow, which was designed to be metric-compatible with Arial Narrow.
The Liberation family was regarded as high-quality, but it covered only the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, which left a lot of writing systems unaddressed. That alone is not a problem; fonts can — and are — extended to new writing systems frequently. But Liberation was licensed under unique terms, which inadvertently prevented such expansion.
Originally, the license was the GPLv2 with the Free Software Foundation's standard font embedding exception (which specifies that embedding the font in a PDF or similar document does not make the document itself a "combined work" triggering the GPL). However, Red Hat subsequently appended additional clauses to the license covering trademark and intellectual property concerns, and included a custom anti-Tivoization provision. After an examination of the extra clauses, Debian decided that they constituted additional restrictions on the GPLv2, which made the license self-contradictory and the fonts impossible to redistribute. The FSF reportedly found the Liberation license not to be a self-contradicting paradox, but said it was incompatible with the GPL. Furthermore, in recent times the GPL-with-font-embedding-exemption approach has fallen out of favor as an open font licensing choice, largely in favor of the SIL Open Font License (OFL). Fedora is aware of this shift, and now recommends the OFL for font projects.
Regardless of the exact details, however, the general consensus was that Liberation's peculiar license was, at best, problematic. More importantly, the practical upshot that few people were interested in contributing new character sets. The fonts have essentially remained unchanged since 2007. Minor fixes and isolated characters have been added, but no entirely new scripts.
Replacement plan
But the metric-compatibility feature of Liberation was its main selling point: it enabled Linux users to share documents with colleagues that had the popular Monotype fonts installed (e.g., all Windows systems), while ensuring compatibility.
On May 17, Parag Nemade emailed the Fedora-devel list to request packaging the Croscore family as a default, to serve as an alternative to Liberation. The Croscore family covers all of the same language blocks as Liberation, plus several new ones (such as Hebrew, Pinyin, and many African alphabets). It consists of three fonts: Arimo, Tinos, and Cousine, which also offer metric compatibility with Monotype's Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New.
They were commissioned by Google for use in ChromeOS, and not only are they also the work of Steve Matteson, the same designer who created Liberation, but they are in fact a more recent version of the exact same designs. In an amusing bit of irony, however, Ascender Corporation (Matteson's company) was acquired by Monotype in 2010, so the new font family is copyrighted by Monotype, but designed to replace other Monotype fonts.
More to the point, however, Google made Croscore available under the OFL, which makes it simpler for outside contributors to extend the fonts to new character sets. Following the discussion in Nemade's thread, Fedora font packager Pravin Satpute proposed importing the Croscore sources into the Liberation package, replacing the problematically-licensed content rather than starting a separate package.
The Fontconfig package handles automatic font substitution on Linux, so once a change is pushed through with rules that replace (for example) Courier New with Croscore's Cousine instead of Liberation Mono, the only remaining hurdle will be for users to get used to the new names in the "Font" menu. On the other hand, growing the fonts to extend coverage to new writing systems is not trivial. The OFL license makes it easier; it enables developers to import and reshape glyphs from the large assortment of other OFL-licensed fonts.
What makes all this so difficult, anyway?
The Fedora plan calls for the community to continue development on the "Liberation 2.0" series, in the open, where the original Liberation was not. It would probably be a minor story if it were not for the fact that the same stalemate situation has developed for other open font commissions.
Much the same sequence of events befell the Bitstream Vera font family, which was designed by Bitstream (another commercial foundry which has since been acquired by Monotype) for the GNOME Foundation, and released in 2003. It, too, was under a license unique to the project, and has not seen any significant updates since its original release. Google has commissioned two fonts for distribution with Android: the familiar Droid family and the newer Roboto; both licensed under the Apache License (as is most of Android itself). Both offer wide language coverage in at least one of the faces (the sans serif), but have not otherwise seen significant expansion.
About the only open font commissioned from a commercial foundry that has grown to include more languages and alphabets is the Ubuntu font family designed by the Dalton Maag foundry. Although the details are of course private, Dalton Maag has an ongoing arrangement with Canonical to add more character sets over time. But the project does use a public issue tracker and accepts input and feedback from the user community, which none of the other commercial font commissions do.
Those differences are revealing. Commissioned open font projects such as Liberation and Bitstream Vera invariably attract significant attention — as do large "donations" of other types to open source. But when they are delivered in a self-contained bundle and not developed further, they have far less impact. It is easy for those of us who natively read European languages to forget just how many writing systems are not covered by basic Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic. Meanwhile, there are purely community-driven font projects that do cover far more of the globe's writing systems, such as Linux Libertine or DejaVu (the latter of which extends Bitstream Vera, side-stepping the peculiar Bitstream license by releasing its changes into the public domain).
The perception among the public is that the commercial fonts are of higher quality than the community-built fonts; a charge likely to rankle anyone who works on free software professionally. But by choosing non-standard licenses and not establishing the font as a software package that can be studied and patched, the early commercial commissions made that charge difficult to disprove. The problem is exacerbated when the foundry is uninterested in continuing to participate (as Bitstream was, when it said it was only interested in extending Vera if it were paid to do so).
But stagnation is detrimental to a font package just as it is to any software. Not only can every font be extended to cover more languages, but there are updated technologies like OpenType features and the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) to consider. Adding new character sets to a font is clearly a challenging task, demanding familiarity with multiple alphabets, and often requiring patches to be integrated by hand in a tool like FontForge. Hopefully the re-started Liberation 2.0 effort can draw on the lessons learned by Dalton Maag and DejaVu, and grow a sustainable project around the family. The original Liberation fonts filled a vital gap on Linux desktops and watching them languish has been disconcerting. Liberation now has the opportunity to re-import an entire codebase under a better license than the one that has hampered it for five years; few projects get a chance to start over at that same level — this is one that at least deserves to take a second shot.
(Log in to post comments)
Posted Jun 19, 2012 19:15 UTC (Tue)
by juliank (guest, #45896)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Jun 19, 2012 19:25 UTC (Tue)
by directhex (guest, #58519)
[Link] (3 responses)
Huh? DFSG clause 4: The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form _only_ if the license allows the distribution of patch files with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. (This is a compromise. The Debian group encourages all authors not to restrict any files, source or binary, from being modified.)
Posted Jun 19, 2012 19:32 UTC (Tue)
by juliank (guest, #45896)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 19, 2012 19:34 UTC (Tue)
by juliank (guest, #45896)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 19, 2012 19:57 UTC (Tue)
by Jonno (subscriber, #49613)
[Link]
(GFDL-licensed works that don't contain any invariant sections are considered free by Debian, but not copyleft, as it is permissible to add an invariant section to it and thus make it non-free)
Posted Jun 20, 2012 15:07 UTC (Wed)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jun 21, 2012 20:41 UTC (Thu)
by przemoc (guest, #67594)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jun 22, 2012 11:19 UTC (Fri)
by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
[Link] (2 responses)
The problem is Terminus is a pure bitmap font. http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/ is the *real* thing ;-)
Posted Jun 26, 2012 14:31 UTC (Tue)
by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
[Link] (1 responses)
That's a good thing. For printing, you want a vector font. But for terminal use, I still use bitmap fonts, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Posted Jun 26, 2012 14:43 UTC (Tue)
by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
[Link]
Posted Jun 19, 2012 20:18 UTC (Tue)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link] (18 responses)
This is not correct. The license was GPLv2 with the font-embedding
Richard Fontana - Red Hat, Inc.
Posted Jun 19, 2012 20:29 UTC (Tue)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:11 UTC (Tue)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link] (14 responses)
> The fonts have essentially remained unchanged since 2007. Minor
This ignores the contribution of Liberation Sans Narrow by Oracle,
Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:17 UTC (Tue)
by mstefani (guest, #31644)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 19, 2012 22:06 UTC (Tue)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link]
Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:42 UTC (Tue)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link]
Nate
Posted Jun 20, 2012 5:19 UTC (Wed)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (10 responses)
So Narrow is likely to be a casualty of the rebasing (it's missing Google-side)
And BTW while the OFL is a nice BSD-ish license, it's not making consensus now because everyone wants a BSD-ish licence for fonts, but because the FSF never bothered to write a good font copyleft license resulting in painful experiments like the font exception or the liberation license.
Posted Jun 20, 2012 16:46 UTC (Wed)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link] (9 responses)
I'm the last person to defend the Liberation Fonts license, but the
It does have something to do with whether the font license is copyleft
> the OFL is a nice BSD-ish license, it's not making consensus now
I don't understand the basis for describing the OFL as "BSD-ish". It's
Posted Jun 20, 2012 19:24 UTC (Wed)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (8 responses)
Of course it has. Standard licenses have well-known relicensing effects and you have a pool of other projects with compatible licensing to cross-pollinate with without involving lawyers. Projects with non standard licenses often end up like liberation : no other projects to draw on, few contributors willing to touch it (who wants his contributions shackled by terms that prevent future re-use), no other project you can contribute to without license poisoning (either because terms are incompatible with other licenses or because they would burden other projects with terms they don't want)
Even dejavu despite its own success remains alone and hampered by Vera's one-of-a-kind (if liberal) license. The few non-standard clauses make it impossible to integrate Vera glyphs in other FLOSS fonts without compromising their own OFL or GPL with font exception license (and good latin blocks are in high demand by creators of fonts for more exotic scripts)
If Liberation had used a safe standard license no one would need to ask Oracle today to relicense Liberation Narrow to extend its life.
> I don't understand the basis for describing the OFL as "BSD-ish". It's
It's a very weak copyleft, sources are not defined (so it's ok to reconstruct a font project from the produced binary font file, and to hoard the actual work files that the font editor uses), the naming and no-advertising clauses are definitely BSD-like
Which is not to say the OFL is a bad license, just that it's a lot weaker than the GPL is for software, and many would have been more comfortable with a stronger license if it was available for fonts (GPL with font exception does not really count as it's hard to understand in a font context by someone with no free software background, and causes no end of administrative problems if any link in the release process forgets to reaffirm this exception)
Posted Jun 20, 2012 19:31 UTC (Wed)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (4 responses)
Any project which could not follow this process suffers from everything I explained before.
Posted Jun 20, 2012 21:16 UTC (Wed)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link] (3 responses)
I would just like to point out that not all lawyers are bad. :-)
Posted Jun 21, 2012 5:42 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 28, 2012 10:26 UTC (Thu)
by gvy (guest, #11981)
[Link] (1 responses)
They mostly are unfortunately: the very approach of substituting natural human conscience with synthetic piles of buggy legal code tends to twist the very perception of basic concepts like truth and false.
And yes, we can still make such statements without fearing to catch a nice lawsuit -- freedom is still here; from Russia (actually Ukraine) with love :)
Posted Jul 10, 2012 1:16 UTC (Tue)
by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)
[Link]
Making agreed upon contracts, whether for everyone or only for a small group, about what may or may not be done is the only way to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Posted Jun 20, 2012 21:14 UTC (Wed)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link] (2 responses)
Agreed (though is that point so applicable to font projects?).
> Projects with non standard licenses often end up like liberation :
There's no "end of life" for Liberation Narrow. It can continue on
I now see the point you're making, which assumes that even GPL +
The correct conclusion may indeed be that no amount of legitimate and
Posted Jun 21, 2012 5:50 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
> Agreed (though is that point so applicable to font projects?).
It is very applicable — most free and open font authors will focus on their own native script, so producing fonts that work in a globalized context requires sharing between works what started as separate projects.
Ghostscript fonts, Vera, etc have been reused multiple times (and show up as licensing problems in new fonts regularly since their licensing is not as clean as new from-scratch projects)
Posted Jun 21, 2012 5:53 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
The GPL intent could be declined in a new font-oriented license, but just adding new clauses won't work. OFL was successful because it was a license rewrite targeting fonts explicitly, with short and easy-to-understand terms.
Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:18 UTC (Tue)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link] (1 responses)
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that that was intentional (a la this other licensing bug from Aug 2007: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=250753). Unfortunately, the tarballs for the oldest releases here: https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liberation-fonts/ are timestamped from 2010, so that may be hard to prove conclusively, modulo time travel.
Nate
Posted Jun 19, 2012 22:04 UTC (Tue)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link]
Ah, an understandable confusion. Mark Webbink described the whole
Yet this is not a standard use of "exception" in the GPL
It is, in fact, for that reason that I urged Fedora to call the
Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:33 UTC (Tue)
by paravoid (subscriber, #32869)
[Link]
I don't know about the specifics on this case, I do know however that fonts-liberation (previously known as ttf-liberation) is part of Debian for quite some time and is even in the current stable release (squeeze):
Posted Jun 19, 2012 22:16 UTC (Tue)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link] (4 responses)
> Fedora is debating dropping the storied Liberation font family from its
But Croscore is not a "fork" of the existing Liberation Fonts.
Posted Jun 20, 2012 9:27 UTC (Wed)
by rvfh (guest, #31018)
[Link]
Posted Jun 20, 2012 10:14 UTC (Wed)
by randomguy3 (subscriber, #71063)
[Link] (2 responses)
> not only are they also the work of Steve Matteson, the
Posted Jun 20, 2012 16:41 UTC (Wed)
by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 28, 2012 10:32 UTC (Thu)
by gvy (guest, #11981)
[Link]
Posted Jun 20, 2012 8:09 UTC (Wed)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jun 20, 2012 13:55 UTC (Wed)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link] (2 responses)
Nate
Posted Jun 22, 2012 23:07 UTC (Fri)
by vonbrand (guest, #4458)
[Link] (1 responses)
And what about the STIX fonts? They are under SIL, and have important backers (with LaTeX support promised for July).
Posted Jun 23, 2012 12:51 UTC (Sat)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link]
Posted Jun 20, 2012 12:14 UTC (Wed)
by kramal (guest, #84631)
[Link] (13 responses)
Does that perception really exist for Linux Libertine? It's one of the most beautiful general-use fonts that I know (including for-pay fonts). I've typed in whole books in it and loved it. Its italic characters are particularly nice and subtle, and I've heard people express admiration (without knowing what font it was, or that it was free).
Liberation Serif is also looks quite decent, but I'd say it's not quite so elegant,with those big pointed serifs and the pointy hook of the lowercase 'r'.
Posted Jun 20, 2012 12:28 UTC (Wed)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 22, 2012 22:34 UTC (Fri)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link]
Posted Jun 20, 2012 13:54 UTC (Wed)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link] (6 responses)
There are open fonts that are very highly-regarded by typographers (the SIL fonts, for example), but they have to fight against some prejudice from people who conflate "free" which "cheapo."
Nate
Posted Jun 20, 2012 15:19 UTC (Wed)
by hmh (subscriber, #3838)
[Link] (2 responses)
Professional commercial fonts do take high pains to get these right as a rule. The "free" ones you find scattered all over the web only do very rarely, AFAIK (which *does* mean the font deserves the low quality moniker, it will look awful at low DPIs and small sizes). IMHO, that stereotype is also attributed to the open fonts, be it deserved or not.
Posted Jun 21, 2012 11:20 UTC (Thu)
by alankila (guest, #47141)
[Link] (1 responses)
http://bel.fi/~alankila/pixman/fontscol.png
There is no hinting of glyph shapes here, just gamma-corrected compositing from sRGB surface to sRGB surface with freetype's light lcd filter to ensure grayness of the composition results. You should be able to see that the default code as a rule produces too dark rendering results. (And the default lcd filter chosen by cairo generates other kind of color fringing at the smallest sizes, but that is separate topic.)
Merely getting the gamma-corrected compositing right should improve results considerably, especially for small sizes where the error made is the greatest, as can be seen on the darkening and color fringing that results.
Posted Jun 21, 2012 18:37 UTC (Thu)
by daniel (guest, #3181)
[Link]
Also tangentially, here is a little project I worked on earlier this year, a slightly unusual take on 3D font rendering:
http://phunq.net/files/shiny81.png
That is Liberation Serif, which I found very pleasant to work with by the way, both for this subdivision modelling and classic low resolution 2D rendering. Sad to hear its not to be updated. The name is great, it would be a shame if that got locked up and died.
Posted Jun 21, 2012 0:18 UTC (Thu)
by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
[Link] (1 responses)
Most of everything is rubbish, it's just more apparent with fonts. Consider that there must be thousands of web servers written by students each year as they learn their craft, but no one would seriously use one in production. They're certainly not all collected together on websites with names like Free Web Servers. Google Web Fonts were a real step forward, as they trawled through the dross and said "these fonts are good". Moreover since they are "web" fonts the quality of the font on a screen was important. Linux users don't download software from the web, so why are they looking for fonts on the web? I'd suggest the reason is the complete lack of attention to fonts in distribution's package managers. They don't even do the simplest thing, such as displaying a sample of the font, let alone allowing searching for fonts by their properties.
Posted Jun 28, 2012 10:45 UTC (Thu)
by gvy (guest, #11981)
[Link]
Posted Jun 21, 2012 20:10 UTC (Thu)
by daniel (guest, #3181)
[Link]
http://phunq.net/files/font24.png
(Apologizes in advance for the slight jaggies in the near field, which need a higher point size for the nearer glyphs, beyond the scope for this demo.)
This seems like a high quality font to me, including the hinting. In orthogonal, pixel for pixel rendering the effect of hinting is more dramatic of course but I think it improves the quality of even the perspective case. I noticed one odd and most probably undesirable behaviour: the hinting algorithm may move the end point but not the interior control point of a quadratic Bezier hull, resulting in an S-shaped artifact in the smooth outline. This can't be good for rasterizing. I doubt it is an error in my outline generator, but of course it could be, and I am not 100% sure whether the issue comes from the font hints or the hinting engine, but it looks like the latter to me.
Posted Jun 20, 2012 17:33 UTC (Wed)
by walex (subscriber, #69836)
[Link] (1 responses)
«commercial fonts are of higher quality than the community-built fonts». Does that perception really exist for Linux Libertine? It's one of the most beautiful general-use fonts that I know (including for-pay fonts). Here almost certainly "quality" refers to "on-screen quality", that is how well the font renders at much low DPI than printing. This used to require extensive hinting, especially for TrueType fonts, and hinting TTF used to require special expensive tools, and a large amount of tedious work, and thus as a rule only commercial fonts, like the Microsoft Web Fonts, were well-hinted. Various Linux suppliers have been in recent years paying foundries to improve the hinting of the fonts they sponsor, the free FontForge tool now makes hinting easier, and as a result some freeware fonts are not somewhat well hinted for low DPI, notably DejaVu, in my impression.
Posted Jun 21, 2012 9:23 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
To get good web font rendering in windows microsoft had to workaround those web font bugs in the font rendering stack of windows of the time
That's why :
Posted Jun 21, 2012 6:54 UTC (Thu)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (1 responses)
I jimmied my fontconfig to substitute Libertine for everything except mono (where I use Inconsolata -- thanks Raph). I use Biolinum for window titles, and have altered Libertine so that the traditional looped st and ct ligatures are treated as standard. (One of the disappointments of Google Chrome is that it doesn't substitute standard ligatures. Or didn't, when last I checked. It's been a long time since I looked at Chrome or Google+.)
If anybody can suggest how to persuade (e.g.) Firefox to consider traditional ligatures standard without changing the font file, I would be very grateful.
Likewise, if anybody can suggest how to persuade (e.g.) Firefox to do spacing between bold letters correctly, I would be very grateful.
Posted Jun 21, 2012 8:51 UTC (Thu)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
Posted Jun 21, 2012 20:25 UTC (Thu)
by Richard_J_Neill (guest, #23093)
[Link] (10 responses)
There are three ways to make fonts work well on a pixel-based display.
[0. Fixed, non-scalabled fonts (the old 75dpi and 100dpi fonts).]
1. Antialias. This adds grey (and sometimes coloured) sub-pixels to avoid jagged outlines. It makes the letters well-shaped, and true to the typeface. C.f. "Cleartype". About 20% of people (including myself) find the effect most unpleasant: it sacrifices contrast, and makes the display look out-of-focus, causing eye-strain. All truetype fonts can be antialiased.
2. Hinting. The shape of the letters is distorted (at small size) so that the lines fit more naturally over the pixel-grid. The letters are sharp and clear. An "e" is no longer a "times new roman 'e'"; more "an optimised e-grid, that is slightly times-new-roman-ish". All pixels are either black or white. With full-hinting and no antialiasing, this works. BUT, you must use the libfreetype which has the "Bytecode interpreter" turned on, and one of the small subset of fonts that are well hinted, Tahoma being a good example.
3. Retina display. Make the pixel density so high that the issue disappears. (alternatively, make the fonts really large, eg 25pt, with antialiasing).
[My personal recommendation is 8pt Tahoma for the GUI, and Terminus for the shell; full hinting, no-antialiasing]
Posted Jun 22, 2012 18:31 UTC (Fri)
by daniel (guest, #3181)
[Link] (9 responses)
Perhaps that 20% would largely consist of owners of 1024x768 resolution monitors or worse. The "high contrast" you perceive in a black/white font is actually aliasing, an effect that is in general, highly unpleasant. Theory says it goes away completely when the highest spatial frequency of the source image is less than half the pixel grid spacing. This is achieved by low pass filtering, aka anti-aliasing. Reality is, for accurate image display you also need gamma correction, otherwise the intensity curve of a standard RGB monitor is wildly wrong. And the pixel spacing has to be less than what your eye can resolve, which the real test is not whether you can see jaggies or not (jaggies produce an easily perceivable nonlocal intensity variation) but whether you can count the number of lines in a series of one pixel stripes.
If you insist on using black/white text display then you need a really high resolution display to make the jaggies go away, but if you display properly band-limited images you will likely be fine with a display with just modestly improved resolution. Your goal is to get the highest, non-aliasing spatial frequency down below the resolution of your eye. To put this to the test all you have to do is move back from the monitor, increasing the point size of the font as you go until any perceived blurriness disappears. There is always such a distance and it is not as great as you think. Then the ratio between that distance and the distance at which you would actually like to view the screen is the amount by which you need to increase your linear pixel density.
Posted Jun 30, 2012 4:25 UTC (Sat)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
So I don't agree with this assessment.
Moreover the idea that high contrast is the same as aliasing is simply false. It's necessary to have aliasing at low resolutions to have high contrast, but even with "anti-aliasing" techniques, aliasing is still present, it is merely mitigated to some degree. I prefer clarity over prettiness. I'm not sure why one would ever elect differently for reading fonts.
Posted Nov 13, 2018 21:52 UTC (Tue)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link] (7 responses)
That being said, most of my work is done on IBM X40 and Lenovo X61 (1024x768 12″ Thinkpads) and an 1280x1024 19″ LCD, in an xterm with the 9x18 bitmap font, and it’s *much* clearer and better legible than anything scaled.
I do prefer the scaled fonts for applications such as MuseScore that generate nice PDFs (though I generally read them “zoomed in” on the screen).
Posted Nov 14, 2018 7:49 UTC (Wed)
by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Nov 14, 2018 13:52 UTC (Wed)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link] (5 responses)
I mean, really. There’s no reason to make it look any worse on them than necessary. There’s especially no reason why any “contemporary” display stuff should look worse than older stuff.
And it isn’t. It’s just that, with these resolutions, you have to think about what your eyes want a bit more. With higher dpi, you get away doing less (e.g. subpixel hinting is completely no longer necessary there), that’s all.
(Higher dpi breaks my bitmap terminal font though, so I avoid those, in order to let the letters stay big enough.)
Posted Nov 14, 2018 15:19 UTC (Wed)
by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Nov 14, 2018 23:27 UTC (Wed)
by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
[Link] (3 responses)
This is not Microsoft (who have contracts with hardware companies) or Apple (who are a hardware company).
There’s no reason to support older hardware less well than newer, within its capabilities. None *at all*, period.
Posted Nov 15, 2018 7:33 UTC (Thu)
by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Nov 15, 2018 15:58 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 15, 2018 16:41 UTC (Thu)
by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
[Link]
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
The problem is Terminus is a pure bitmap font
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
- There is no support to have them automatically scaled up. In contrast, you can run Fixedsys Excelsior TTF at 32px (i.e. twice its designed size) just by telling xterm/fontconfig to render it as such.
- Besides vectorized glyphs, truetype fonts can also have embedded bitmaps. This is very dominant in the CJK glyph range where the (antialiased) scaledown is often too blurry. But Arial/Times also have bitmaps for Latin scripts.
IOW, I'd love to have Terminus as TTF, just to be able to run it somehow at sizes larger than 32px.
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> Originally, the license was the GPLv2 with the Free Software
> Foundation's standard font embedding exception (which specifies that
> embedding the font in a PDF or similar document does not make the
> document itself a "combined work" triggering the GPL). However, Red
> Hat subsequently appended additional clauses to the license covering
> trademark and intellectual property concerns, and included a custom
> anti-Tivoization provision.
exception and the additional clauses from the beginning. This was a
result of Red Hat's agreement with Ascender.
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> fixes and isolated characters have been added, but no entirely new
> scripts.
does it not?
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
"In 2010, Oracle donated a fourth typeface to Liberation: Liberation Sans Narrow, which was designed to be metric-compatible with Arial Narrow."
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> luck finding anyone at Oracle willing to relicense Narrow now they
> got rid of OpenOffice.
problem you refer to has nothing too much to do with whether a license
is standard or not. It would exist even if Liberation Fonts had been
under vanilla GPLv2 + GNU font-embedding exception.
or not. As to that, though, you say:
> because everyone wants a BSD-ish licence for fonts, but because the
> FSF never bothered to write a good font copyleft license resulting
> in painful experiments like the font exception or the liberation
> license.
actually a copyleft font license. See clause 5.
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> problem you refer to has nothing too much to do with whether a license
> is standard or not.
> actually a copyleft font license. See clause 5.
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> love licenses and having to discuss them. Non lawyers would like to
> forget the subject exists).
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
(offtopic) ELAW
(offtopic) ELAW
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> pool of other projects with compatible licensing to cross-pollinate
> with without involving lawyers.
> no other projects to draw on, few contributors willing to touch it
> (who wants his contributions shackled by terms that prevent future
> re-use), no other project you can contribute to without license
> poisoning (either because terms are incompatible with other licenses
> or because they would burden other projects with terms they don't
> want)
>
> If Liberation had used a safe standard license no one would
> need to ask Oracle today to relicense Liberation Narrow to extend
> its life.
under the Liberation Fonts license, as it has done for two years, in
the worst case. (I am actually hopeful that there could be some way
for Oracle to effectively relicense Liberation Narrow under SIL OFL.)
font-embedding-exception is a problematically nonstandard license with
bad effects on potential contributor community development. I suppose
I can agree with that. We relicensed the Lohit fonts, a somewhat
parallel situation to Liberation Fonts but not quite so bad, from
GPLv2 + font-embedding-exception to SIL OFL, and one of the
motivations for doing so from the project maintainers' perspective was
to expand at least the user community for the fonts. Our friends at
Google helped us out in this effort.
well-intended addition of permissions atop GPL will yield a good font
license.
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
>> pool of other projects with compatible licensing to cross-pollinate
>> with without involving lawyers.
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> well-intended addition of permissions atop GPL will yield a good font
> license.
My research said that the original (alpha? beta? unnumbered?) downloads circa May '07 did not have the custom exceptions, only the standard GPL-font-embedding-exception, as it says here: http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.press.redhat.com%2F2007%2F05%2F09%2Fliberation-fonts%2F&date=2008-01-17 and that the updated license was added subsequently.
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> downloads circa May '07 did not have the custom exceptions, only the
> standard GPL-font-embedding-exception, as it says here:
> http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pre...
> and that the updated license was added subsequently.
shebang as "GPLv2 + exception", which is not how I (who was not at Red
Hat at that time) would have described it. Indeed, if you look at the
text of the Liberation Fonts license you will see that both the
font-embedding exception and the anti-Tivoization provision are
described as "exceptions"
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:LiberationFontLi...
context. Customarily, or in accordance with FSF practice at least, a
GPL "exception" is a grant of additional permission. So the
font-embedding exception is an exception, but the so-called
anti-Tivoization provision is not a true exception, but is, rather, an
imposition of an additional restriction. It is similar to, though
broader and less specific than, the User Products provision in GPLv3.
Liberation Fonts license the Liberation Fonts license (rather than
describe it as "GPLv2 + exception" which in Fedora packaging metadata
parlance means GPLv2 plus additional permission).
Correction
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=liberation
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> distribution in favor of a fork.
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
> same designer who created Liberation, but they are in
> fact a more recent version of the exact same designs
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization
Linux Libertine
Libertine looks quite nice, yes. It's a shame that Biolinum shares with Arial the flaw of I-l underdistinction.
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
http://bel.fi/~alankila/pixman/fontsinv.png
http://bel.fi/~alankila/pixman/fonts.png
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
We do to some extent, and you might have missed Fontmatrix.
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
1. microsoft web fonts look ugly anywhere else (it's not the other font stacks which are bad it's the font themselves which have buggy hints)
2. other fonts (with clean hints) look bad on windows when they trigger web-font specific workarounds they don't need
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine
To me the big mystery is why anyone still bothers with Liberation, or Deja Vu, or any of the numerous other ugly faces.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Optimizing for common case is what is happening. You still have knobs to cater your exotic hardware – like you found, grayscale works better than subpixel. But don't expect optimizations, or even defaults working best for your hardware. 15 years ago it would be reasonable, not now.
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Older hardware is supported by providing settings you need to change if you decide not to use current, widely used hardware.
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
Liberation fonts: hinting needed
But wait another 10 years and HiDPI will be standard.