
Chrome OS Looks to Refresh Standard Fonts - dcawrey
http://www.thechromesource.com/chrome-os-looks-to-refresh-standard-fonts/
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thristian
What's hilarious is that RedHat already commissioned Ascender to make freely-
available metric-compatible fonts, resulting in the Liberation family:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts>

Given that Ascender is the official vendor for Microsoft's core fonts
including the original Times, Arial and Courier, one wonders if they're
utterly sick of those particular sets of metrics yet.

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pavlov
Actually these new Chrome fonts (Tinos, Arimo and Cousine) _are_ the
Liberation fonts. Exact same design, but a larger glyph set.

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thristian
Ah, I guess Google just didn't like the GPLv2 licence attached to the
Liberation fonts, and paid for them to be re-licensed.

That's a bit of a shame, I'd been looking forward to having a wider set of
Free fonts but the Liberation family is not a thing anyone would choose to use
if it weren't for the metrics-compatibility.

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jlees
Nah, we didn't pay just to relicense/extend Liberation. This pickup of fonts
is a snapshot of a work in progress.

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alanh
The person who wrote this article asserts that these fonts are “very much
similar” to Times, Arial, and Courier, respectively. However, Times and Tino
would never be categorized together (except that they are both serif fonts,
but hey, there’s about a 50-50 chance of that). Cousine is also quite
different from the typewriter-esque Courier.

Edit: As lambda points out, they have compatible metrics, so there shouldn’t
be cases where layouts meant for one of {Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New}
“break” by having content overflows on Chrome OS. (The team has also set up
aliases for these relationships, besides setting the default "serif", "sans-
serif", and "monospace" fonts.) Cool!

Direct links follow:

Issue & related commits on Chrome OS: [http://code.google.com/p/chromium-
os/issues/detail?id=5287&#...</a><p>Download the fonts: <a
href="http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/download-and-use-the-new-chrome-os-
fonts-in-ubuntu/" rel="nofollow">http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/download-
and-use-the-new-...</a>

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lambda
They are "very much similar" only in that they have compatible metrics. Thus,
text typeset in Times, Arial, and Courier won't have to re-flow when using
Tino, Arimo, and Cousine. You're absolutely right; the style of the fonts is
quite different than the style of the one's they are intended to replace.

From the font info for Arimo:

    
    
        Unique name	Ascender - Arimo
        Copyright	Digitized data copyright (c) 2010 Google Corporation. 
        Trademark	Arimo is a trademark of Google and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.
        Description	Arimo was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Arial™. Arimo offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.
        License	Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1

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thasmin
The biggest difference I see is in the monospace font. Courier is serif and
Cousine is not. Serif fonts are good for coding but my guess is that anybody
coding has a better font than Courier.

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technomancy
Keep in mind it's meant for low-resolution devices, where the serifs of
Courier would feel lost.

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sukuriant
I understand that "why?" will probably be responded with "why not?" but I'm
going to ask it anyway. What benefit does bringing in more fonts do? What is
the advantage of using these fonts over the current free/open fonts, like
Nimbus, Arial, Courier New, etc?

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dchest
Arial and Courier New are proprietary fonts. Arimo, Tinos, and Cousine use SIL
Open Font License.

Not sure why not other open fonts, but hey, we now have three more, how's this
not a good thing?

(Designed by Steve Matesson <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Matteson>)

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sukuriant
Ah, I see. I was going off memory that Arial existed in Open Office. After
double-checking my sources (OpenOffice.org 3.2 running on Ubuntu 10.04.1) I
see that I was incorrect in that. Nevermind, then.

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blasdel
Ubuntu doesn't ship it by default because of FOSS-wankery in the style of
_debian-legal_ — the Microsoft Core Fonts are perfectly free to redistribute
in their original compressed form.

 _apt-get install msttcorefonts_

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technomancy
Thank goodness the monospace font is sans-serif.

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cmelbye
So, they're making an imitation of an imitation of Helvetica?...

I'm so glad I use a system that includes the real thing.

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alanh
It does look a little nicer, from what I’ve seen so far; the cutoff on the
lowercase "r", for example, is vertical instead of horizontal, bringing it
closer in line with Helvetica.

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blasdel
What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for
typefaces — in the eyes of the law they're just goddamn shapes. You hold
copyright over the exact contents of the distributed file, and you can
trademark the name, but you can't stop someone from making an exact clone
independently.

Microsoft licensed the original "Core Fonts" from Monotype, who had already
made Arial as a metrically equivalent clone of Linotype's Helvetica, but
slightly different because they would otherwise get yelled at by their dork
friends, and it was just one more in a large pool of other very similar fonts.
Then later generations of dorks curse them for making it slightly different.
Now Google has commissioned a new set of pointlessly-different fonts, which
they will be yelled at for. It would have been better if they'd just made
direct clones — they'd still get yelled at by the same people, but at least
shit wouldn't look fucked up. The only problem would be finding someone
willing to make them.

Pretty much all of the bullshit surrounding fonts on the web stems from FUD
from the handful of type foundries and their fanboys. Maybe Google should buy
Monotype to free fonts the way they bought On2 to free video codecs:
<http://www.google.com/finance?q=TYPE> (as an added bonus they'd get Helvetica
since Monotype now owns Linotype)

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yason
_What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for
typefaces_

Isn't that the way it should be _in general_? Nobody is allowed to copy
specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the
effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better,
themselves.

With the following paragraphs of your post I agree fully. As soon as something
becomes so ubiquitous as Helvetica, it should fall in public domain. (Or
someone should pay for it and give it to everyone else.) Helvetica is so
beautiful, timeless, that it would deserve to be free.

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chc
> Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy
> specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the
> effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better,
> themselves.

Yes, but they aren't allowed to distribute your program just by grepping your
name out. You can basically do that with a font AFAIK.

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blasdel
But that's only because you can say you got the same resulting serialization
of vectors from creating it yourself from scratch.

