News and new fonts

From our news archive ...

03/10/2010

Firefox 3 supports OpenType

Firefox now supports a few layout features of fonts with OpenType or AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) tables. The most obvious one is basic ligatures.
Although the implementation seems to be not optimal as Ralf Herrmann mentions in his blog on typografie.info

03/09/2010

Adobe releases font development kit for OpenType

The goal of the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType package is to share the tools used by Adobe font developers for wrapping up PostScript fonts as OpenType/CFF font files, and adding OpenType layout features. These tools are used for in-house development of new Adobe OpenType fonts.

Source: adobe.com

03/06/2010

Classical pictograms

The Gerd Arntz archive in the Municipal Museum of The Hague owns more than 4000 pictograms and small illustrations, that were created by the german graphic Gerd Arntz in the 20s and 30s of the last century.
Now, for the first time, a selection of of the classical images can be watched online on gerdarntz.org.

03/05/2010

The hottest script Girls

How nice can reading be!
In his series "Ladies of the Base Line" the artist Matt Sutter has drawn women only with letters, punctuation marks and numbers from one font, No letterform has been skewed, stretched, flipped or any other bastardizing technique — just scaling at rotating.
The prints of the images can be ordered at Inkfinger Store.

Source: inkfinger.us

02/26/2010

New free fonts released

The Libertine Open Fonts Project, with its focus on free fonts of high quality, has released version 2.7.9 of the font "Linux Libertine".

Since September 2003 Philipp Poll and his team work on the realization of a high-quality, and GPL-licensed TrueType fonts. The project was dissatisfied with the free fonts, that were available at that time.

Goal was to develop a "book typo with reasonable upper and lower length" and with a good line spacing. The printed image should be lighter than the "Times".

Another reason not to imitate the "Times", was the copyright, which is still owned by "Monotype".

Source: www.pro-linux.de

02/25/2010

Fonts from the tube: Gelvetica / Tomatica / Heldentica

Dutch designers from the agency "highway" (Utrecht) developed three new fonts on the basis of Toothpaste, hair gel and ketchup!
The fonts can be downloaded from autobahn.nl for free. On the page you also get an insight into the typical functioning of font production :-)

Source: autobahn.nl

02/24/2010

Red Hat provides new free fonts

Red Hat announced the public release of these fonts under the trademark LIBERATION at the Red Hat Summit. There are three sets: Sans (a substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, and Bitstream Vera Sans), Serif (a substitute for Times New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman, and Bitstream Vera Serif) and Mono (a substitute for Courier New, Cumberland, Courier, Nimbus Mono L,and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono). The fonts are now available for to download.

Users are free to use these fonts on any system they would like. They are free to redistribute them under the GPL+exception license found in the download. Using these fonts does not subject documents to the GPL--it liberates them from any proprietary claim. Redhat encourage users to make them the default in Thunderbird, Firefox, and Open Office.

Source: Redhat

02/23/2010

20%+ revenue thanks to Georgia font?

A good font is certainly important, but can only a change to a different font increase sales by 20%? "Lovejoy" from the Webmaster World forum reported that he replaced the Times font with Georgia, and a sharp increase in sales occured at the same time: Popular fonts. On the same site another user called "johncory" reported that he replaced Verdana with Georgia. The consequence were dramatically falling sales. So Georgia is not the optimum in any case.

Source: internetmarketing-news.de

02/06/2010

Another Ouch! ...

Bad bug: Font download crashes Windows

It's not a big secret that Microsofts Windows operating systems contain many bugs. In constant regularity Microsoft provides patches. But regularly however, new bugs appear.

A new curious bug recently appeared on Bugtraq. Andrew Connell reported, that a simple font file is enough to reboot several flavors of Windows without prior warning. To demonstrate the issue, he provided an only three kilobyte big opentype font.

A doubleclick on this font file reboots Windows without any error message. The bug was reproducable on Windows 2000 and XP, while "Windows.NET Enterprise Server" seems to be not affected. Even the installation of Service Pack 1 under XP did not helped. A solution for this problem does not exist yet.

Source: pcwelt.de
Source: securityfocus.com

02/05/2010

Ouch! ...

Microsoft removes swastika from Office font

Microsoft accidentally delivered Office 2003 with the font "Bookshelf Symbol 7" that contains two swastika symbols. According to product manager Simon Marks the font was derived from a Japanese font.

"It was discovered by a customer a few weeks ago", Marks said. "There was no evidence of an evil intent. We have already contacted various Jewish organizations and will immediately publish a utility which will remove the font from the system." Later a tool will follow which only removes the two swastika symbols from the font.

Source: tecchannel.de