dal@midgard.Midgard.MN.ORG (Dale Schumacher) (07/14/89)
I've been looking through the selection of fonts distributed with X and must say that I'm somewhat disappointed in their overall quality. The new font families (under 75dpi and 100dpi) were obviously generated automatically from some kind of outline definition, and thus I can understand why they look choppy, and it IS nice to have such complete coverage of size/weight/style. However, the fonts in misc and under the contrib directories are pretty poor, IMHO (at least the ones with the smaller bitmaps). Font design is kind of like model building or figurine painting to me, a somewhat artistic diversion, but not a professional ambition. Over the last several years I've designed quite a few hand-tuned fonts which I believe are far cleaner and more readable than the small fonts provided with X. I'd be happy to contribute these fonts to the public domain if there are people out there who would be interested in using them. If there is such interest, I'd also need to know where to send them for best distribution. Would posting them here be appropriate? I don't get comp.sources.x, so I'm not sure I could post them there. As a side issue, a few of my fonts are based on commercial examples (such as Courier), though they were created from printed examples rather than other bitmaps. I've compared my hand-tuned Courier to 75dpi/courr10.bdf and it is much more readable, but I don't know if I can post it without offending the copyright holder. I'd like to make it available, but I expect I'll need permission.