[XeTeX] FontSite 500 fonts and XeTeX

[Barry Schwartz]

William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com> skribis:
> They're also no-name knock-offs for the most part and I've found that  
> they have kerning and spacing issues and problems w/ encodings (esp.  
> accents).

My understanding is that they actually are supposed to be a separate
development path from outlines upon which the bigger foundries'
digital fonts are based. The main reason they might not be as good as
other branches is that Sean Cavanaugh isn't that interested in making
them better and raising their worth, because he doesn't really like
working on fonts.

Another problem with the fonts, relatively minor: t1lint reports bad
BlueScale settings. Fontforge BTW now can guess a correct BlueScale
for you; that feature may still be only in CVS, I'm not sure. It will
also warn you of a bad BlueScale when you try to generate a font. You
get a bad BlueScale by making your fonts better rendered in Adobe
Reader but using a tool that doesn't warn you if you need to update
BlueScale--for instance older fontforge. :)

> There're lots of better typefaces w/ clear provenance and imprimatur  
> --- better to use something which actually benefits the people who  
> created the original designs.

I forget the details but if Cavanaugh isn't wrong then those people
already benefitted by getting discounts for giving the people who
digitized their fonts for them the rights to develop and license their
own versions. You don't get do-overs for a thing like that. Cavanaugh
ended up with rights, he says, in lieu of uncollectable back pay as a
result of business failure.


-- 
Barry SCHWARTZ   /   Barijo ŜVARCO
chemoelectric ĉe chemoelectric punkto org  http://chemoelectric.org
             Free stuff / Senpagaj varoj:  http://crudfactory.com