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Bitstream Vera Fonts 1.10 Released

Submitted by jg on Wed, 2003-04-16 19:43. Usability

The "It's Soup, Come and Get It" release.

Go get them from http://www.gnome.org/fonts for your greater viewing pleasure.

Please read the release notes; not that yesterday's note was not all correct; the release notes has corrected information.
The "It's Soup, Come and Get It" release.

Application

Well, not an application. But the fonts will enhance your applications!

Description

This is the Bitstream Vera family of fonts, version 1.10, the first
version available under a free license. Please discard the beta test
fonts.

Note that these fonts have tighter spacing (leading) than the beta test
version of Vera, and that 0O and l1 are clearly distinguishible in the
mono family, as well as many other fixes and adjustments. The leading
adjustments required redesigning the accents, and took extra time to
complete.

Thanks to all of you who downloaded the beta fonts and commented on them.

Enhancements

Your desktop will look nicer!

Download

Please see and read http://www.gnome.org/fonts. Please read the release
notes. Please ensure you have a non-buggy freetype installed properly.
Additonally, there will shortly be a fontconfig-2.2 release that will both
fix various existing fontconfig bugs, but also improve behavior below 8 pixels.

Bug reports

Even fonts can have bugs. Please report problems to fonts at gnome.org.

Acknowlegements

Our great thanks to Bitstream, Inc., for the donation of high quality fonts,
and Jim Lyles in particular, for going the extra mile and adjusting the
leading, which involved quite a bit of unanticipated work.

- Jim Gettys

Re: Bitstream Vera Fonts 1.10 Released

Submitted by Anonymous George on Wed, 2003-04-16 23:26.

Everything I've heard, and my own desktop, seems to support the opposite: that there is indeed a lack of high quality open fonts. In particular, I believe it's hard for distros to find fonts that they can bundle with their products. The MS Core fonts are available due to a fluke in their licensing, but it is a restrictive license, and that wasn't really a solution to the problem. I don't think they can be bundled with a distro, but I may be wrong(Gentoo installs them by default, but it's ok in their case because they pull them off of Sourceforge during the xfree install, they aren't redistributing them). Also, many Linux users copy a Windows Font folder to their system and that really shouldn't be necessary.

The fact that these fonts are the nicest looking fonts that have touched my Linux box is secondary to the fact that they are

1. Open

2. Because they are open, will be actively developed and one can be sure that they will be improved, and always work nicely with freetype, fontconfig, etc.

In sum, huge thanks for the fonts!

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