The Register: Fabulous Fonts in KGX

The Register is running a
short tutorial on
everyone's favorite obsession: getting fonts to look their best.
Included are instructions for re-compiling the FreeType engine
to get an optimal look, something distributions often fail to do due to
potential licensing problems.
Another interesting thing I learned from the article: although MS has
removed the web fonts from their servers, apparently the original
license permitted unlimited non-commercial redistribution in unaltered
form, and hence a SourceForge project has sprung up
which provides the fonts and instructions for installing them. All-in-all,
a worthwhile read for font aficionados.

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Comments

by Neil Stevens (not verified)

I never even got to see yours... I saw Alain's, but that's it.

by Datschge (not verified)

Then there's at least hope that you are more humorous than the one who deleted it. ;P

Seriously though, if anyone really thinks it's necessary to hide away certain posts from other people then better include a rating system into dot.kde and let the public decide what to hide (I'd prefer a positive rating system, ie. post with the most points/recomendations are shown at the top and those with the least at the bottom).

Same could be done with the articles themselves so Stevens can rate all other articles to get the "Fonts in KGX" article out of sight asap. ;) (that's joking, ok!?)

by shm (not verified)

I would love a system like in OSnews where all the "moderated" posts are not deleted but the editor, but instead moved to a new subpage. You can click on "View Moderated Posts".

by Neil Stevens (not verified)

http://dot.kde.org/1035582174/1035612842/

That and all its children disappeared. I suppose it could be worse, it could have been cleared and replaced with some namecalling.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

What namecalling? All you do is comment out the troll with the standard , put a note about it and leave the children.

by Neil Stevens (not verified)

Your "notes" usually involve namecalling of the contributor.

Of course, it was Andreas who deleted my comment. Is it only you who leaves notes?

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Contributor, huh? Give me a freaking break. Please show me what you are talking about before you say that.

And besides, I don't have infinite patience to deal with abusers, their happiness is not my priority, and if they pissed me off enough and wasted my time enough for me to insult them, so what?

Where were you when I was trying to get cooperation on the KDE Dot News community FAQ, anyway? http://dot.kde.org/1024894942/

I'm off.

by Jason Katz-Brown (not verified)

I agree completely, especially for the reasons Rob said. And I thought something was quite wrong as soon as I saw the article, and did not need to read any other comments to give me this opinion.

As another slightly-related issue, the article really could be written a bit better - why did it have to be posted as news?

by Benji2 (not verified)

But is it possible to get AA for non-TT fonts ? Because i never saw good-looking screenshots with TrueType fonts (whatever OS it ran on), I dont get why people absolutely wants MSTimesNewRoman and MSArial when we have AdobeTimes and AdobeHelvetica which looks really better (but only at fixed size).
Why always focus on those ugly TT fonts ? Is it the only way to get AA ? And how does LateX does, since it looks great in xdvi ?

by Karl-Heinz Zimmer (not verified)

YES, it is possible to get Anti-Aliasing for real fonts too - not only for the common surrogates called 'Truetype' - actually the only thing that is 'true' about that is the truth that Microsoft did not want to pay for real fonts' licenses. :-D

please see here: http://www.enfusion-group.com/~adrian/docs/Anti-aliased_X/

by someone (not verified)

You can enable AA for vector fonts, that is TrueType, or Type1. They are defined as a set of curves and are mapped to the screen every time they're drawn. This way the AA algorithm can decide what to blur where. With bitmap fonts, all you get is a set of pixels and you can do no AA there.

And LaTeX uses TeX as its typesetting engine. TeX uses its own font system (also outline-based), designed, if I'm not wrong, by Donald Knuth himself, and of incredible quality. I think there is only one really complete font available for TeX, though.

by Karl-Heinz Zimmer (not verified)
by Hakenuk (not verified)

Is it possible to withdraw such a licence agreement of MS. And would they be obliged to pay for the withdrawel to the users.... Anyone keen on this private law case?

by Per Wigren (not verified)

Will the upcoming Qt (3.1) use Xft2?

by Datschge (not verified)

Yes, it's already included in the current Qt 3.1 Beta. Look at trolltech's homepage for reference.