MS ‘Web Fonts’ Pulled
On the eve of LinuxWorld Microsoft pulled its free ‘web fonts’ (Verdana, Georgia, et al) citing one bizarre reason –
Most users who wanted the fonts have downloaded them already
– and one that makes perfect sense when you consider the fonts were part of some Linux distibutions:
[We] also found that the downloads were being abused - repackaged, modified and shipped with commercial products in violation of the EULA [end-user license agreement].
(There’s talk that the EULA, which allows the redistribution of the fonts as long as the legalese documents accompany them, has not in fact been breached. Time will tell, I suppose.)
OSnews.com apparently broke the story first and it was then picked up by ExtremeTech, Slashdot (where some people don’t seem to be aware of the difference between sans-serif faces and serifed faces) and Ars Technica.
Verdana and Georgia were designed by Matthew Carter of Carter & Cone specifically to provide highly legible bitmapped fonts for on-screen use (Antipixel specifies Verdana in its style sheets, but not exclusively; there’s a list of fallback options, so it’s by no means required). The fonts are apparently still shipping with Windows and the Mac OS (installing Internet Explorer adds them to the system) but there disappearance from their previous home reveals a not insignificant weakness in the open-source world; the lack of high-quality fonts. (Links to still-extant copies of the fonts can be found in the articles above.)
The sites carrying the story discuss it mostly in terms of the gap it opens up in the ‘open-source community’ but there are potentially serious long-term implications for anyone who designs web sites or cares about decent on-screen typography. Of course, if a site has been properly designed, none of the disappeared fonts are actually required but the shrinking of a widely-accepted common set of faces to work with can only be a bad thing.
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Posted to Computers • 2002.08.19 (Mon) • 16:55
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