
Introducing the Ubuntu Font Family to the web - macco
http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2010/12/introducing-ubuntu-font-family-to-web.html
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mmaunder
This seems like such a small change, but it's the most important single
contribution to adoption and usability that Ubuntu have made to date. Design
matters.

~~~
burgerbrain
_"the most important single contribution to adoption and usability that Ubuntu
have made to date."_

To be fair, Ubuntu isn't really in the business of making changes, just
packaging up software other people write in an accessible way. Most of the
projects and changes that people praise Ubuntu for hit Fedora first because
they're developed by Red Hat engineers, or because they're developed by 3rd
parties and Fedora picks them up first because of their whole "bleeding edge"
thing.

~~~
pastiche
_To be fair, Ubuntu isn't really in the business of making changes_

Tell that to the Unity team. Or look at the app indicators. Or notify-osd. Or
wait until Wayland hits. This last one isn't Ubuntu code, but it's still a
change they're pushing for.

Really, Ubuntu writes a decent amount of code and I think it's doing the
distribution a disservice not to mention this.

~~~
burgerbrain
You do realize that the Wayland came from devs working for Red Hat right?

Didn't think so.

~~~
pastiche
_"You do realize that the Wayland came from devs working for Red Hat right?"_

I did mention that Ubuntu didn't write that code, so yes, I'm aware of that.
Kristian Høgsberg, the original author, was working for Red Hat at the time he
started the project. I don't know how much dev time Red Hat currently
contributes in the current state of Wayland, if any.

In any case, the only ones actively pushing for Wayland use are the Ubuntu
devs. Fedora has half-heartedly implied that it will use it at some point in
the future. Maybe.

~~~
burgerbrain
Dave Airlie, a Red Hat engineer, is basically _the_ guy when it comes to
pushing progress in Linux's graphics stack. Shuttleworth declaring which way
Linux development should go doesn't do shit for the community if he doesn't
hire developers to see it through.

~~~
ciupicri
As Linus Torvalds would say: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code.".

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gcr
Holy moly, I literally saw this appear last night. It was looking for good
fonts to use in a project of mine, clicked one, clicked back, and _there it
was_.

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sp332
Did they find a good font license yet, or are they still using the temporary
Ubuntu Font License? There's nothing wrong with that license per se, but I
know they were trying to make a better license for fonts in general to reduce
license proliferation.

~~~
thristian
<http://font.ubuntu.com> (linked in the article) still says "Ubuntu Font
Licence 1.0", and the "Licensing FAQ" says "For the short-term only, the
initial licence is the Ubuntu Font License (UFL)."

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euroclydon
Web fonts seem like such a boondoggle to me. "Solutions" like SIFR are just
not an area I've had the time to explore.

How complicated is this new Ubuntu thing? I went to the webpage, and the font
examples are AN IMAGE, I can't even select them! How are they "brought to the
web?"

~~~
sp332
This is pretty close to a real solution, much better than SIFR. This lets you
specify a remote font file, which the browser will download and apply to the
text. This means the text shows up _as text_ and not as a picture or Flash
embed. It also means that if the font file is not available for some reason,
the browser will fall back to something reasonable.

The Google Font Directory is a library of freely-licensed fonts that you can
link from your own web pages. When you click a font name here, it will take
you to a demo page so you can see how well it works.
<http://code.google.com/webfonts>

~~~
ugh
Or, more accurately, this is the solution, very different from sIFR or image
replacement. It’s how every sane person would expect webfonts to work (plus a
few weird quirks you have to know about).

It’s relatively simple to do on your own and solutions like Google’s Font
Directory or Typekit make it even easier.

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junkbit
They are also working on new Monospace font which should be ready in few
months

