At Sun, 13 Mar 2005 22:17:26 +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote: > Hi, Thiemo Seufer wrote: > > Replacement fonts are a standard feature, and using is usually breaks > > formatting of the document. > This may be a nitpick, but documents which *break*, instead of just > looking somewhat sub-optimal, are mostly designed (I'm using that word > loosely) by people who still think that a word processing program works > like a typewriter.
Erm, no. Many "metric compatible" fonts aren't exactly that way. See http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/technotes/tfmetrics.pdf for an interesting comparison of Palatino. For the "base 14" postscript/PDF fonts, these fonts are not embedded in documents, so metric compatibility *does* affect common use cases. Font licences are a real problem. Font licencing traditions were laid down a long time ago and (for example), many of them only allow redistribution in a subsetted (ie: embedded in some document) form - the entire font may not be redistributed. If we go for the "no preferred format is no source at all" extreme, then almost *no* fonts are usable. Do you have Bitstream Vera in a form thats appropriate to edit? (A notable exception here is the fonts developed recently for wine. They *are* actually compiled by fontforge at build time) To get back on topic, I feel that winning the free font battle is something it would be good to do. However, I don't feel that we get closer to winning the free software war by junking almost all of our fonts right now. In particular, non-latin1 languages generally can't make do with ASCII and for many of these, there are no appropriate free fonts available. I do *not* wish to drop our (good) l10n efforts in order to claim "100% free fonts" - that all seems just a bit silly. [aside] > The same thing happens if people want to print the nicely letter-formatted > text some US colleague mailed them on *gasp* A4 *shock* paper, and no font > equivalency will help you with that one. In PDF, at least, the "crop box" is able to be repositioned on the actual "media box". Not a magical solution, but it does allow tools to get A4 vs letter right in many "normal" cases. -- - Gus -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
