The Next Big Thing: Fonts.

Fellow friends of fair design,

from my point of view the time has come to focus on one important issue: fonts.

We've come a long way in OSX skinning, and today we have lots of toys: we have Icons, Wallpapers, MSStyles, WBSkins, Bars, Docks, Shadows, modded DLLs.

For all of these we have tutorials and know what to do.

But what about fonts? They add the "certain feeling" to the system - but our current solutions are pain in the ass. We got

- 20 different versions of the same Fonts - nobody oversees which fits in which application

- Only one per name can be installed

- "overwriting" the normal Windows-Fonts - like soulless does - is a smart idear but turns out with nothing but problems (if your using any other language than english)

- There are complete different ways to change the fonts: via overwriting (see above), via regedit hacking, via MSStyles, via the desctop preferences and via WBlind skins. I have no idear how to combine these ways to archieve a good looking system AND a system that WORKS, both on CRT and LCD.

- different tools and skins require different fonts - as seen in the WMP9 / TK4 thread.

I've traveld this forum for three days, seeking advise - no results.

What we need is some kind of "standardisation" for this hole mess and some walkthroughs how to handle font issues in the future.

What do you think?

#60207

There are two Solutions, Tohoma and MS sans Sarif... j/k

It's a great idea... All we really need it Lucinda Grande, Miraid font set and Apple Garmond

#60223

Can't we just use the official Lucide Grande font from a mac?

#60227

Friend...

the situation with fonts is the same as with visual styles etc. There are many "Panther" themes, each with its own big or little differences from the others and from the original Panther, docks that all resemble very much the Mac one, but not at 100%, and so on.

The strange thing about fonts is that you may find Lucida Grande, Lucida Grande and LucidaGrande, and all are different to each other. Besides, I don't think the two computers treat equally fonts. So, if you have the exact Mac fonts on a PC, they may appear different, especially in small screen sizes.

Good luck out there!

#60261

Well, the fonts are the same. They are all TTF. So you can just copy them over right from a mac.

But the Font RENDERING is different, so Windows' fonts will never look as good.

Linux fonts do though.

#60264

I agree w/ contra, its seems that most OS's ive seen have had better font compositing were better than Windows's. yes, even Lotus-123 r.2.4! hear me out...

Even though not the charictars from different fonts in Lotus 123 are not tru typed or smooth typed, they look great!

#60272

lucida grande in osx is a dfont (data resource fork) not a ttf

even if its a ttf you'll have to convert it to a windows ttf

(my school has G5s dual 2ghz and im using it right now) :6

#60807

Just want to chime in here.... you don't have to confine yourselves to think in ttf, since we're pretty much focused on XP you can go with Open Type fonts (OTF) and Adobe Type 1 fonts (PFB/PFM); this could possibly yield better results? At least I *think* these are supposed to be cross platform to some extent.

#60808

Those are much crappier. TTF fonts are currently the best out there.

#60811

Well, depends on what you want them for, on Stevie BM's iTunes skin the font included had to be either the type 1 or the otf because with the ttf the skin would not do font smoothing. As for their crappiness/non-crappiness ratio, check it out for yourself.

Get the 3 versions (TTF, OTF, Type1) of that font HERE as far as I've been able to see they are pretty much the same.

That font is a direct transform from Type1 to TTF, OTF, Type1 (renamed), and it preserves the layout of the original pretty well.

#60819

Ah, but try resizing Type1 or OTF fonts. Using them at native is OK, but as the size increases, they get pretty crappy pretty quickly. Whereas TTF fonts stay beautiful, scaled, and AA'd forever(almost).

#60823

Ummmm.. I can't see any difference **Click to see image**

#60833

OS X fonts look better because, even if the same font is used on a PC and a Mac, the Mac actually RENDERS it differently.

So what we need to do is create a font which, after being rendered by Windows, looks the same as its OS X counterpart.

#60858

Well, I dont think thats possible, OSX Anti Aliasing is pretty good.

In fact, its even patented (byte-code AA).

#60860

Hey GillBates, can you zip up some nice OT fonts?? id like em if ya could

Josh

#60866

I'll try and get some up when I get home, on my work laptop I only have some bare essentials. :shy:

#60873

excelent idea.

Actually im using Souless fonts and it looks very closer, specially, Arial.

Im in if we can do some kind of 'project'

#60875

Originally posted by contrasutra@Sep 29 2003, 03:24 AM

Well, the fonts are the same. They are all TTF. So you can just copy them over right from a mac.

But the Font RENDERING is different, so Windows' fonts will never look as good.

Linux fonts do though.

Ahh.. but just wait until the full builds of Longhorn start appearing... with the spangly new desktop rendering engine Maybe then Windows will finally have a desktop (When skinned, of course) that look as good as Apples... The problem at the omet is that no matter how much you skin windows... The quality just isnt up to the desktop rendering standards of a Mac.

Oh how I hope things will change in the year or two to come...

#60983

Originally posted by contrasutra@Sep 30 2003, 08:42 PM

Ah, but try resizing Type1 or OTF fonts. Using them at native is OK, but as the size increases, they get pretty crappy pretty quickly.

Thats exactly what I am talking about: at 20px up ALL Fonts look great (as seen in the postet screenshot), but the crititical part is 7 to 12 px. All of these sizes are used in the XP-GUI, and most of the fonts out there look crappy - at least at one of these sizes.

Right now, I'm using StyleXP just for the Font-modding - for me it woks way better than what I can archieve with WindowBlinds.

#61043

Originally posted by o0o The DEEJ o0o+Oct 1 2003, 04:33 AM-->

QUOTE(o0o The DEEJ o0o @ Oct 1 2003, 04:33 AM)

#61045

I just took a stroll down google-lane looking for more info on this whole OpenType/Type1/TrueType thing.... and I must say I learned a lot... It seems OpenType is here to stay: learn it, live it, love it.

It combines the best features from Type1 and TrueType into one nice single-file package (Type1 uses many files per font) and has native support in Mac and Win2000+ platforms (yes, that does mean true cross platform support); and as far as I could tell, there seems to be support for it in XFree86 (some Linux guru please pop in here and confirm/deny?). It has actually been embraced so deeply that all of us that use XP have been using OpenType fonts without even knowing about it!

If you access your font directory like \\machinename\c$\Windows\fonts (skipping the way windows displays this directory so you can see the fonts as files) you'll see that different fonts have different icons.

The ones represented with an "O" are OpenType fonts even if they have ttf extension, for further verification of this, just double click them.

It seems OpenType originated in a joint effort by Adobe and Microsoft so both bring to the table the best of Type 1 and TTF (read more about it @Adobe)

So I guess what I’m saying is… can anyone get the OS X fonts we want in any of this formats? "We wants our aqua!!!"

#61113

Originally posted by Taha+Oct 1 2003, 08:36 AM-->

QUOTE(Taha @ Oct 1 2003, 08:36 AM)

Originally posted by o0o The DEEJ o0o@Oct 1 2003, 04:33 AM

#61116