Chrome OS Looks to Refresh Standard Fonts | Hacker News Reader

Chrome OS Looks to Refresh Standard Fonts

thechromesource.com

45 pointsdcawrey27 comments

What's hilarious is that RedHat already commissioned Ascender to make freely-available metric-compatible fonts, resulting in the Liberation family:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

Given that Ascender is the official vendor for Microsoft's core fonts including the original Times, Arial and Courier, one wonders if they're utterly sick of those particular sets of metrics yet.

Actually these new Chrome fonts (Tinos, Arimo and Cousine) are the Liberation fonts. Exact same design, but a larger glyph set.

Ah, I guess Google just didn't like the GPLv2 licence attached to the Liberation fonts, and paid for them to be re-licensed.

That's a bit of a shame, I'd been looking forward to having a wider set of Free fonts but the Liberation family is not a thing anyone would choose to use if it weren't for the metrics-compatibility.

Nah, we didn't pay just to relicense/extend Liberation. This pickup of fonts is a snapshot of a work in progress.

Only temporarily. :)

The person who wrote this article asserts that these fonts are “very much similar” to Times, Arial, and Courier, respectively. However, Times and Tino would never be categorized together (except that they are both serif fonts, but hey, there’s about a 50-50 chance of that). Cousine is also quite different from the typewriter-esque Courier.

Edit: As lambda points out, they have compatible metrics, so there shouldn’t be cases where layouts meant for one of {Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New} “break” by having content overflows on Chrome OS. (The team has also set up aliases for these relationships, besides setting the default "serif", "sans-serif", and "monospace" fonts.) Cool!

Direct links follow:

Issue & related commits on Chrome OS: http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=5287&#...

Download the fonts: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/download-and-use-the-new-...

They are "very much similar" only in that they have compatible metrics. Thus, text typeset in Times, Arial, and Courier won't have to re-flow when using Tino, Arimo, and Cousine. You're absolutely right; the style of the fonts is quite different than the style of the one's they are intended to replace.

From the font info for Arimo:

    Unique name	Ascender - Arimo
    Copyright	Digitized data copyright (c) 2010 Google Corporation. 
    Trademark	Arimo is a trademark of Google and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.
    Description	Arimo was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Arial™. Arimo offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.
    License	Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1

The biggest difference I see is in the monospace font. Courier is serif and Cousine is not. Serif fonts are good for coding but my guess is that anybody coding has a better font than Courier.

Yes, it's a lot closer to Microsoft's Consolas than it is to Courier.

Keep in mind it's meant for low-resolution devices, where the serifs of Courier would feel lost.

I understand that "why?" will probably be responded with "why not?" but I'm going to ask it anyway. What benefit does bringing in more fonts do? What is the advantage of using these fonts over the current free/open fonts, like Nimbus, Arial, Courier New, etc?

Arial and Courier New are proprietary fonts. Arimo, Tinos, and Cousine use SIL Open Font License.

Not sure why not other open fonts, but hey, we now have three more, how's this not a good thing?

(Designed by Steve Matesson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Matteson)

Ah, I see. I was going off memory that Arial existed in Open Office. After double-checking my sources (OpenOffice.org 3.2 running on Ubuntu 10.04.1) I see that I was incorrect in that. Nevermind, then.

Ubuntu doesn't ship it by default because of FOSS-wankery in the style of debian-legal — the Microsoft Core Fonts are perfectly free to redistribute in their original compressed form.

apt-get install msttcorefonts

Thank goodness the monospace font is sans-serif.

So, they're making an imitation of an imitation of Helvetica?...

I'm so glad I use a system that includes the real thing.

It does look a little nicer, from what I’ve seen so far; the cutoff on the lowercase "r", for example, is vertical instead of horizontal, bringing it closer in line with Helvetica.

What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces — in the eyes of the law they're just goddamn shapes. You hold copyright over the exact contents of the distributed file, and you can trademark the name, but you can't stop someone from making an exact clone independently.

Microsoft licensed the original "Core Fonts" from Monotype, who had already made Arial as a metrically equivalent clone of Linotype's Helvetica, but slightly different because they would otherwise get yelled at by their dork friends, and it was just one more in a large pool of other very similar fonts. Then later generations of dorks curse them for making it slightly different. Now Google has commissioned a new set of pointlessly-different fonts, which they will be yelled at for. It would have been better if they'd just made direct clones — they'd still get yelled at by the same people, but at least shit wouldn't look fucked up. The only problem would be finding someone willing to make them.

Pretty much all of the bullshit surrounding fonts on the web stems from FUD from the handful of type foundries and their fanboys. Maybe Google should buy Monotype to free fonts the way they bought On2 to free video codecs: http://www.google.com/finance?q=TYPE (as an added bonus they'd get Helvetica since Monotype now owns Linotype)

What’s so hard about spending money for fonts you want to use? That’s what Microsoft should have done. That’s what Google should do.

You can't own a shape. I say bring on the clones.

I don’t dispute that.

A lot more goes into a font than random shapes put together.

But that wouldn't employ typographers!

What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces

Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, themselves.

With the following paragraphs of your post I agree fully. As soon as something becomes so ubiquitous as Helvetica, it should fall in public domain. (Or someone should pay for it and give it to everyone else.) Helvetica is so beautiful, timeless, that it would deserve to be free.

> Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, themselves.

Yes, but they aren't allowed to distribute your program just by grepping your name out. You can basically do that with a font AFAIK.

But that's only because you can say you got the same resulting serialization of vectors from creating it yourself from scratch.

Sorry about that, the introductory paragraph became unclear when I rearranged things.

We fully agree, I think it's awesome that typefaces are not IP — what I find fucked up is the present situation where everyone tiptoes around that fact and kowtows to the foundries, because anything less would be an affront to typography itself (ala 'hating the troops').

Upstart type nerds everywhere could legally be crafting better-implemented versions of Helvetica — but they aren't, because other type-nerds would beat them up for paying such an insult to the $300m corporation that owns the name.

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