On 9/4/07, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Fonts are an absolute pain when you do not have them, When they can be found in the first place, they are not consistent in their behaviour and size. The notion that because of there being a font for one operating system there is one for another is simply wrong.
Yes fonts are a pain. But the font that I've mentioned are all TTF, and will work on any reasonable modern system.
Amusingly.. it is free fonts that reduce the pain since they are available to more people and can be distributed more liberally.
By putting this policy into concrete, we assume responsibilities that we do not have at this time. Helping sort out the mess that is what fonts are is one.
I haven't commented on the proposed policy as others have stated my views more clearly than I would... but I do not see how you reach this conclusion.
The policy would require that things we distribute will work with freely licensed tools. This is already believed to be the existing practice.
So far you haven't shown us an example of text we distribute which can't be used with freely licensed tools, so there is no conflict. Perhaps most people will read the text using non-free fonts, just like most people browse the site with IE on Windows... Our practice is to avoid doing things which make the decision to use free tools hard for those who would not choose to use propritary tools. I feel sorry for people who browse our site using IE on Windows, but that they do is their choice, and it has no direct conflict with making sure that our work is useful for people without Windows.