Interestingly, however, copyright law doesn’t protect typefaces, just their name one could, in theory, print out at very high resolution a good quality font, scan it in, then reconstruct it with minimal effort, call it something else, and, bam, we got ourselves our very own font. I would love if some philanthropist typographer dumped a bunch of quality fonts into public domain, but there are no typographers with that much money. In addition to the up-front design work, a typographer must adjust the kerning, make sure the fonts are properly hinted so they render without garbage and artifacts at low resolution, account for ligatures, etc., etc., etc. It may seem to be an easy task, and perhaps creating the basic idea and look of the typeface is, but there is so much detailed and painstaking work involved in turning a typeface into something usable, particularly on a low-resolution device such as our monitors.

It takes a professional typographer about a year to create a decent font. There must be plans afoot for some major corporations to convert their “fleets” of desktop computers to linux, and/or for some major hardware distributors to start preinstalling linux on a much wider scale.įonts are tough to make. I wonder why because Linux only has a 1% market share on the desktop. This shows that MS is very worried about Linux on the desktop.

Microsoft’s pulling the free fonts from its download area is a very petty move which will be remembered, moreso than some heineous crimes MS has committed.

Maybe that’s just me, but this has caused me to favor full screen terminal editors over X editors so far. On the other hand I find the standard console fonts for linux easy to read and well-proportioned. Yuck! Also, simpler naming conventions for linux fonts would encourage developers to show more taste in the font specifications in their applications. Lucida typewriter is a much nicer fixed font, but so many apps specify “fixed” or default to “courier”. I find it hard to believe that someone could not design a more attractive font that “fixed”, for example. What’s so hard about designing attractive, easy to read fonts for linux? True Type and anti-aliasing issues aside (which have now been solved in the major distributions) the standard set of X11 bitmapped fonts for linux leaves much to be desired.

Geez font free download