[Foundation-l] Fonts

Thu Jul 21 12:02:34 UTC 2005

Robert Scott:
"One of the best current fonts is at: http://home.att.net/~jameskass/
He only asks for a $5 registration fee, and it is a very good font that
includes many code points for several languages including braille and
signing language fonts (as defined in the Unicode standard), but
unfortunately it is not GFDL compatable in terms of common distribution,
and Mr. Kass is retaining copyright on the font."

I'm pretty sure there is no free or shareware font that comes close to
code2000, in breadth of coverage. It supports almost any language. Its latin
character is not is main strength (not too nice on small point sizes), there
are not truetype hints AFAIK, but it contains nearly all defined unicode
characters.

In fact I would strongly recommend to at least license this font for the
Wikimedia server for rendering of timecharts, once I got unicode support for
EasyTimeline ready (ET unicode version works under Cygwin, waiting for a
patched version of Ploticus for Linux, can't do that myself).

Given the very small license fee for code2000, and the fact that James Kass
made it not too easy to even pay that small fee if one wants to (payment
details are somewhat hidden) so that probably most people stick to the
nearly complete demo version, I'm sure that mr Kass is not into this for the
money really. He might be persuaded to change the license if some sponsor
would  pay him a one time fee. I would be a major boost for open source font
support.

Erik Zachte