Comments on: Font-ification

By: Want better fonts in Ubuntu or Linux Mint? (or any Linux distro for that matter) | Welcome to Andrewblock.net

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:22:05 +0000

[...] One area where Linux consistently lags behind Windows and Mac OS (in my opinion) is in fonts. The fonts included with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, for example, are nowhere near as pretty as the Windows Vista / Windows 7 fonts. Point Counter-point [...]

By: O Ubuntu e as Fonts uma nova saga se inicía. | Governança & Tecnologia

O Ubuntu e as Fonts uma nova saga se inicía. | Governança & Tecnologia — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 02:38:11 +0000

[...] o próprio Shutleworth em pessoa publicou em seu blog um artigo destacando os problemas que enfrentamos com o gerenciamento de fonts nos sistemas GNU/Linux atuais [...]

By: Suchawato

Suchawato — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:03:25 +0000

The funfonts pack is nice.
I use those all the time.
It’s got a lot of neat fonts for all kinds of uses.
I did have to do some looking to find this pack though, it would be nice if it were easier to locate, and install in various distro’s.
Maybe a openfonts.org website that included a section for linux-able fonts that were not necessarily available under the GPL but were an option non-theless.
this could be an easy source site for distro vendors to get the up-to-date font information for their distro.
The main question I have is why these aren’t available as part of Open Office? It seems a little odd to me that there wouldn’t be an easy link/feature/part-of-the-package option as a standard feature. As Mark said, the standard fonts are not really all that impressive.
As far as Ubuntu is concerned, I suppose a step in the direction of ease of use would be to make packages like Funfonts available in the repositories.

By: Stu M.

Stu M. — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:28:40 +0000

I have a question.
Why are fonts so damn hard to install in Ubuntu?
Even when logged in as root, it is the system will not let one cut and paste files into the fonts folder! This seems really silly and somewhat corrupt, as the whole point of linux is to be able to do whatever one wants with it. It seems rather strange that one cannot directly modify the fonts folder without running a bunch of obscure commands in the terminal. This is silly. The average user is not going to want to do that! I am an art student. I am not a left-brained person who takes to writing command line code. I like a visual interface because I am a visual person. I need more fonts for the work I do, but cannot install them as of yet, because my sytem won’t let me paste them into the folder!!! This is infuriating! It’s MY computer! Why should I not be able to mess with it as a Root User?? I have some good fonts to install too!!!
Anybody know of a SIMPLE solution to this (like disabling the “safety” feature)?
Thanks in advance!

By: Henry Hollenberg

Henry Hollenberg — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:07:59 +0000

Nice Article. I have been working thru an ubuntu/OpenOffice font issue with several hundred documents my wife has created in OpenOffice 1.0.3 that are now
“broken” due to missing fonts and layout issues in Ubuntu 7.04 / OpenOffice 2.2. I am working through these issues with Canonical (Ubuntu) support. From
a users perspective what I would like to see is a HOWTO that explains “how to” not get snake bit. Most of the tutorials I have run across are geared toward installing
and using lots and lots of fonts or various licensing. How about just one. One with very specific criteria:

1) Free/OpenSource.
2) High Quality-Proportional/Outline fonts that work well with: X, PS, PDF, Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice and mainline (PS) printers.
3) Finally, and probably most important, fonts that are guaranteed by OpenOffice/Ubuntu/Linux/OpenSource to be:
a) available
b) installed
c) seamless/transparent (mainline apps above know about them) to the user FOREVER!

Note the Forever part. I assumed this would already be covered with all the articles I read about OpenOffice being
adopted by goverment offices of various nations for official documents. It would seem to me to be important that
these documents be “rendered” on screen or paper the same way they were created over long periods of time, ie
10′s to 100′s of years. Pulling up a set of documents that you put alot of work into several years back using the same
word processor just to find they have been electronically scrambled is MADDENING!

So a list of “SAFE” fonts or “GUARANTEED” fonts would that meet the above criteria would be one feature I would be
keenly interested in as a user. If you stick to these fonts your documents would have a degree of “immortality”. If you
stray off this beaten path into the “font forrest”, let the buyer beware! If you are not creating a disposable document you
may be very unhappy with the results. If not today, certainly down the road when you need to quickly print a few 100
flyers, forms, posters…..for that rally, club meeting or business proposal.

Personally I would be quite pleased with any such list and an explanation of it’s use even if it contained only a single font.
Of course we could always add another once we got the first one right.

just my 2 cents. Henry Hollenberg

By: Endolith

Endolith — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 06:07:41 +0000

During your reorganization, don’t forget about GNOME’s meaningless font sizes:

http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2007-01.html#font-sizes

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:35:39 +0000

John Drinkwater:

Thanks for the link to the font article on antigrain. Some really wonderful stuff in there. One thing I noticed that he did not address perhaps due to just unfamiliarity with the latest freetype advances:

http://www.nabble.com/Re:-Texts-Rasterization-Exposures-t4062959.html

As is often the case in free software projects, it seems patents, politics, and organization issues are involved. Getting top notch LCD filtering, auto-kerning, and fonts with proper (ie MS web fonts) metrics into the various libs/distros is very difficult. The new Liberation fonts from redhat/ascender are a step in getting proper metrics in fonts. More work is needed to get them properly hinted (they look decent with the autohinter).

Oh and another link:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=343670

Deals with getting the good filtering into feisty.

By: John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 22:28:11 +0000

Mark,
Have you bumped into this article on Windows, Mac, & Linux font rasterisation yet?
http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

By: 10.0.1.49

10.0.1.49 — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 20:58:35 +0000

Mark Shuttleworth habla del estado de los fonts en linux…

Mark Shuttleworth habla de las fonts en linux, licencias, problemas y demás…

By: Ray Privett

Ray Privett — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:53:42 +0000

Wow, that was fast.

A message from the Free Software Foundation is below.

FreeSans, FreeSerif, FreeMono have the same font exception as the Liberation fonts.

Dear Ray,

Thank you for your question about the Free UCS Outline Fonts.

These fonts are licensed with the font exception, and so you are not
required to GPL your document merely because it uses these fonts.

The exact terms for these fonts are available in the README file which
is distributed with the font files; I checked against
,
but any release of these fonts since about 2002 should contain the same
terms.

regards,

John