User login

Navigation

Contribute

Interested in contributing to FootNotes? Click here to submit news stories to us or visit this site for more information about available opportunities.

GNOME Support

Friends of GNOME

Now's a good time to say thanks for the best desktop environment on the planet by becoming a Friend of GNOME or by upping your current Friends level. Contribute by joining the Friends of GNOME program. All contributions are tax-deductible in the U.S. Thanks to our generous Friends

Links of Interest

Syndicate

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: These fonts look great. However...

Submitted by jg on Thu, 2003-04-17 19:38.

These fonts lack most delta hinting. For us, who run anti-aliased all the time and do better hint snapping and subpixel stuff than Microsoft, this is fine.

On Windows, these fonts won't generate great results as bitmaps (which generally require alot of delta hinting

to get good bitmaps, or embedded bitmaps). With Cleartype enabled, Vera should do pretty well, but not as good as with Xft/freetype. I know Cleartype is available in XP, but I dunno about Win2K.

The other issue is that some fonts have defective hints. With our technology, those defects don't get swept under the rug: this can show in some fonts if you see a stroke go to too small a width.

A large amount of the delay in getting Vera in the first place was understanding this problem in Prima (Vera's forebear), which had defective delta hinting. Removing all delta hints from Prima allowed us to understand the problem, and then move forward to what has now become Vera.

These defects are more visible in some fonts than others.

So, ironically, we see bugs in fonts that aren't visible in the inferior technology used by Windows and Mac :-).

- Jim

» parent