Typophile - Opinions about TeX Gyre fonts - Comments

Sorry, I am back at work

Thomas Phinney — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:32:50 -0700

Sorry, I am back at work now, but also trying to catch up from my outage. More on that elsewhere, I think. Suffice it to say that everyone is fine in my family, and we’re all home. :)

I think that the comments in this thread give a fair bit of guidance. I could do a more detailed critique, but it would take a lot of time, and anybody capable of fixing things based on that would also be capable of reviewing the fonts and finding and fixing problems along the way. A *really* detailed critique could be done, that might guide a less experienced type designer, but that would be at least an order of magnitude more work. 40-80 hrs instead of 4-8, kind of thing.

Cheers,

Thomas, Could you

JCSalomon — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:45:17 -0700

Thomas,
Could you please post your review of TeX Gyre, or has everything been said in this thread?
—Joel

No, I don’t mean to

Nick Shinn — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:01:20 -0800

No, I don’t mean to belittle the project. It’s great to see people and organizations developing fonts with this scope, and I don’t consider it competition for new commercial type designs — if anything, I would expect that these fonts, with their introduction of typographic niceties prompted by OpenType, will stimulate interest in commercial fonts amongst people who might not otherwise consider them; as long as the commercial fonts have the character support. So the challenge for foundries is to develop fonts which have both the character complement and the typographic features. It’s a huge amount of work.

As I see it, this is the

DanGayle — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:32:01 -0800

As I see it, this is the goal of this project: Create open licensed fonts with reasonably extended character sets and added typographic niceties like small caps and old-style figures, all wrapped up in a well-coded cross-platform Opentype font.

It’s not to create open licensed typefaces with character sets that cover more than the basic Western Latin. That’s covered elsewhere, by other typefaces such as Gentium and the Deja Vu fonts.

Is it to create math fonts for educational texts? Not really, because that has already been done.

So if your purpose is in fact to make nice, typographically rich fonts, why even release them unless the rich typographic parts of the font are well-done?

This is not to belittle the contributions made so far, but I think Nick is right. Well-intentioned does not equate to well-drawn, and rich type design is by definition well-drawn.

I agree, but Stage 3 is

Nick Shinn — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:02:06 -0800

I agree, but Stage 3 is locking the barn door after the horse has bolted.
This project would have benefited from involving people who know how to draw, from the outset.

Where it has been possible to cannibalize the original roman characters to make new characters, the resulting glyphs are ok if not too much modification is required — many Cyrillic characters are fine. But where even a little re-drawing is required, the quality suffers. Where completely original letterforms are required—the Greek lower case of “Pagella” for instance—the results are ghastly. Really, those should be re-done from scratch.

It seems to be the

DanGayle — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:08:45 -0800

It seems to be the consensus, at least of those here at Typophile, that Stage 3 ought to be moved forward in the grand scheme of things.

The TeX Gyre project

JCSalomon — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:20:19 -0800

The TeX Gyre project does pay for professional designers to work on the fonts, though the initial work was done by programmers. They are currently soliciting for donations for Stage 2 of the project (Unicode math coverage; Stage 3 in the original project plan) which is expected to cost €40K, some of which should be covered by the TeX users’ groups. Stage 3, “a cleanup and redesign of current shapes that are not okay”, is supposed to follow somewhat later.
—Joel

The University of Toronto

Don McCahill — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:00:47 -0800

The University of Toronto Press spent several thousand dollars in the late 80s to create PostScript outlines of Knuth’s math fonts. However, management at that time decided not to share those fonts with the community. There is competition even within the scholarly marketplace.

(In the end it was not a big problem. Adobe came out with the Lucida Math set, based on Knuth’s mappings, within a year.)

hire a commercial foundry to

Scott Thatcher — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:51:12 -0800

hire a commercial foundry to produce the fonts you need

This has been done before. Those familiar with LaTeX will know that Hermann Zapf was commissioned to create the Euler math fonts by the American Mathematical Society. They were originally created to complement Knuth’s Concrete text fonts, but they are also a good complement to Palatino and other similar text fonts. I’d love to see this happen a few more times, perhaps creating several high-quality font packages to complement a wide range of text fonts.

And while I’m giving my wish list, I’d love to see someone (pay to?) create a multiple-master font consisting of just those mathematical symbols that aren’t letters and don’t need as much design, but whose weight should be adjusted to match the text face. Many newer fonts are now shipping with Greek and other glyphs that would be useful for typesetting math, but they need matching symbols if everything is to piece together well. Computer modern is very complete and is often used to fill in missing glyphs in other typefaces, but its symbols are too light to match many of them. [The mathkit package attempted to do this using metafont in 1998, but I would guess that it produces bitmapped fonts as the final product.]

I thought of giving this a try just before my son was born... Afterwards, I didn’t think about it as much.

But why council others not

Nick Shinn — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:12:20 -0800

But why council others not to contribute a little?

I wasn’t. In fact, might I recommend that you pass the hat round amongst the scholarly community and have everyone chip in a few bucks? Then hire a commercial foundry to produce the fonts you need, and avoid being caught between the rock of commercial fonts that are deemed too expensive, and the hard place of “first-rate mixed with junk” that occurs with open source.

Nick, in general, I have a

charles_e — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:18:09 -0800

Nick, in general, I have a lot of respect for you. But not tonight. Scholarly publishing has gotten along only by more or less skirting the issue of embedded fonts appearing on the internet.

As far as whining goes, I have given of my talents, such as they are, to scholarly publishing. When needed, and when within the license, I have cut needed characters such as phonetic symbols, the Latin characters from Latin Extended A, B, and Additional. I’ve done what I can for the aesthetics of some fonts too, cutting small caps — especially italic small caps — sometimes roman as well. Occasionally, heart in hand, I even cut old-style numbers. I sweat a lot over the old-style 2. And other work.

How much do we charge for this? Not one damn cent.

But I do not have the skill to complete full alphabets, or some of the more intricate phonetic symbols, and the licenses forbid my releasing the characters I can do to the scholarly community generally. For the Adobe fonts, I’d give them to Adobe for re-release, but I imagine they wouldn’t want them. They’re OK, better that the fonts under discussion, but not perfect. They work for text size settings. Sorry I lack the skill but not the desire.

I don’t care if you don’t participate. Your choices are yours to make. But why council others not to contribute a little? If you think university presses have the money & are just being tight, you are wrong. From my side of the blanket, I see the whining coming from a different spot.

Charles, if your business

Nick Shinn — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 16:05:48 -0800

Charles, if your business sector can’t afford to pay for good new fonts, you don’t deserve them.
So quit whining and don’t expect a handout!
You’ve been spoiled by digital publishing, paperless publishing on the internet, and faux features for small caps, fractions, and superior figures, which make things seem a little too easy. And the glyph- and feature-loaded fonts that Adobe bundles with InDesign.

Since FontLab 4.5 enabled Mac-based type designers—people like myself with independent foundries—to produce typographically-rich OpenType fonts three years ago, we have been working hard constructing these beasts, and they are starting to be published. Concurrently, Reading University has been seeding the industry with a new breed of broadly-educated (language, culture, coding, history) type designers who have a quite different foundation than the previous new generation of 200-character-per font, DIY deconstructionists. And also, an internet community of diverse stakeholders has coalesced and nurtured the development of mega-fonts*. All this is in play, and the scholarly publishing sector is beginning to reap the dividends.

Having spent thousands of hours in developing scholar-worthy fonts that are still not published, I already feel like I have donated enough time and talent, without having to put out freebies. I don’t know exactly where I will recoup my investment, but I expect it will more likely be from the corporate and periodical sectors. Scholarly publishing will be a beneficiary, as the pool of suitable fonts available from independent foundries grows larger. So get out your cheque-book and build more fonts into your budget, because the new ideas that will stick will be those that are well thought out, well written, well edited, and well set—in well-designed new fonts.

*An example: in his Typblography blog, Thomas Phinney started a thread on Cyrillic character support, in which he outlined his, and Adobe’s philosophy. That really put things in perspective, and was an inspiration to me by providing a logical framework for increased character support (with examples). He also solicited feedback. So right there, the dynamic intersection of the corporate, the academic, and the independent.

Thomas, here’s wishing you back on your feet soon.

I took a look at the Century

charles_e — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 09:42:11 -0800

I took a look at the Century Schoolbook a few weeks back, and thought some of the added characters rendered the font (well, the new characters) unusable. The old-style figures were particularly bad.

I’d say Thomas has it about right.

When you think on it, typographic niceties are not required for communication — lining figures and full caps communicate information adequately. The reason for their use is aesthetic, and if they are rendered poorly, they don’t fulfill that function.

OpenSource fonts are not about letting people get something for free. The licenses for most fonts, if adhered to, prohibit anyone but a large, successful commercial corporation from fully using them. For example, consider scholarly journals, which ideally are (1) printed, (2) put on the web, (3) available for downloading, and (4) etc. Sometimes the total subscriber base is as small as 1,000, though the total audience, esp. for single articles, may be significantly larger.

What are they to do? Site licenses are prohibitively expensive. How many good OSF are there, maybe 1 or 2?

Again, Thomas is correct — what is needed is a few good folk to donate their time & talent.

There is still plenty of business left for type designers. Just look at the design forum “I need a font that looks like (whatever), but is new!!!” IMSLTHO, most of the suggestions are inferior to (whatever). But they are new, & apparently sell.

FWIW

I can say based on some

Miss Tiffany — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:11:39 -0800

I can say based on some recent suggestions which I’ve made that Adobe does listen to the users.

DanGayle wrote:That’s how

Scott Thatcher — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 06:00:26 -0800

DanGayle wrote:That’s how they did the small caps? I never got that far in reading the site. Automation without human correction is bad for the soul.

I should offer the correction that I read far enough to see how they automated creation of small caps, but I didn’t read far enough to see if they stated at a later time that they corrected the glyphs by hand. Having read changelogs, etc. for the Latin Modern fonts, it really does seem like they’re putting serious attention into these projects.

Thomas: as a frequent lurker here, I’ve always appreciated your comments, and I hope you get well soon.

Opinions about TeX Gyre fonts

DanGayle — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:49:52 -0800

Here’s an interesting situation: URW releases Avant Garde, Century Schoolbook, Times, Helvetica, Bookman, Zapf Chancery, Courier, and Palatino to the Ghostscript community as freely available and modifiable basic Latin and Western European Postscript fonts.

The Polish Grupa Użytkowników Systemu TeX (GUST) took it upon themselves the task of to “remaking and extending of the freely available fonts distributed with Ghostscript” by adding further diacritics and language support.

The resulting TeX Gyre OpenType fonts also include added proportional oldstyle figures and small caps versions not found in the original Postscript release.

That’s right: Helvetica and Courier with Small Caps.

(Although, the small caps R in Helvetica looks a little wonky.)

So the question arises: what is your opinion about the Tex Gyre fonts? I’m interested in either your technical analysis of the fonts themselves or your opinion about the whole thing idea.