Re: Font Website Usage Barriers and Monopoly

From: QSJN 4 UKR (qsjn4ukr@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jan 12 2011 - 05:00:28 CST

  • Next message: Johannes Rössel: "Re: Font Website Usage Barriers and Monopoly"

    Font creation is not so expensive and complex process. Two points for
    each line and three-four points for each circle-quadrant in gliph's
    contour. Hinting is unnecessary for hi-resolution-devices. I think the
    problem lies elsewhere. A person can easily create a font for his
    needs, and publish it on its website, and link it with its stylesheet,
    but hardly super-corporation can master the creation of a font
    containing all of the Unicode characters. Therefore, we are often
    forced to use a set of dissimilar fonts. I will say even worse: if you
    look "Arial Unicode MS", for example, you'll see that Cyrillic glyphs
    are partially copied from the Latin, and partially created in a
    different style. In order to do a great job, we need special methods
    for separating it into parts. First of all, there must be a standard
    (PANOSE?), which determines the basic properties of the font: ex to em
    ratio, the thickness of the strokes, the radius of the roundings, the
    shape of serifs. These properties must be either the input parameters
    of the font (that is, the font does not contain any information about
    them at all, but then it does not contain anything that could be
    sold!), or to be strictly identical for some font family. Second, the
    user's applications should create a composite font from the fonts of
    some family (do not install each font separately, but take a gliph (a
    kerning pair if you wish) where it found (in Internet if you wish)).
    And then many rats as you and me will take this matter to chew: from
    each - on a letter, and "Funicode" is ready! Unfortunately, now
    everything works differently, and in fact works well. Somehow nobody
    wants to change anything in such dark area as the fonts.



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