On Tue, 2002-10-15 at 06:04, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
I guess for a lot of people fonts aren't a big deal. I'm beginning to realize that better font support is one of the big advantages Windoze has over Linux. If peole learn to create their own fonts, I suspect the open source community leave Microsoft in the dust in the respect. It shouldn't be that technically difficult to create a good font set. I suspect artistic tallent is more important in the long run. Providing the artisticly talented people with the tools to handle the technology involved should make the transition from font follower to font leader a reality.
I'm not sure where MS got all of it's fonts, but I know that *great* fonts are not cheap not easily produced. Have you priced any Adobe Postscript fonts lately? TrueType fonts take a lot of shortcuts and still come out as good fonts, but even those can't be cheap to produce. Years ago, I got a copy of MacroMedia's Fontographer (Windows/Mac). I thought it would be cool and fun to make my own fonts. After just a little reading, my head started to swim! Fontographer was so popular, that I don't think it's been updated in four years. Now, all that being said, I don't think creating a great font is all that much more difficult than creating a powerful, free, stable, multi-user, multitasking operating system, and the free software community has not only managed to do that, but done it better than most of the commercial Unix companies were able to do with millions of dollars and a 30 year lead. Given a good, Free tool that really works, I can see lots of bad fonts being placed out under an "Open Font Lincense" (or whatever), but I can also see that many great fonts would come out of it. The hard part is to write the really, really good font creation package first. It will have to allow the "fontographer" to be totally involved in the font work without having to fight the software. Yeah, you're right, it could be done! Jody Harris -- Realization Systems, Inc. http://www.realizationsystems.com/