Thu 03 May 2012 06:34:11 PM UTC, comment #2:
Jacob,
Most of the rhetoric has been made more reasonable.
Furthermore, there's now a "coverage" page
http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html
that makes it easy to see what the font's got.
Besides that, I also alert major distros as to updates in the font.
But as you said, the main thing is, to just keep making it better, reaching out to more communities. By adding and improving ranges for real users, I think we do that.
Thanks again!
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Sun 04 May 2008 12:25:52 PM UTC, comment #1:
Jacob,
Once again, very well said.
I will organize the front page to emphasize the visitor's first questions:
What is it?
What does it do for me?
How does it compare to other similar things.
Also, I realized I didn't have a tool for breaking down and comparing the Unicode range support of various fonts. So I wrote a FontForge script "ranges.py" for this purpose. In CVS, under tools/.
Within the free software community, I think FreeFont holds up rather well. The other big offering, the DejaVu fonts, are quite a different face visually; for different purposes, one may be better than the other (I have my own preferences). Also, FreeFont and DejaVu are currently quite complementary regarding the ranges outside Latin and Cyrillic. So I think an argument can be made.
Compared to fonts available in the non-free community, there is likewise an argument to be made for FreeFont based on coverage.
It's a work in progress.
As to freedom, this can also be regarded as a marketing point, of more use to some people than others. As you pointed out, some for some corporate users it is a minus, but for our primary targets, it is non-negative and often a plus. But it's built into the name, so this feature can't be easily overlooked.
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Sun 04 May 2008 12:13:00 PM UTC, original submission:
This is from Jacob Poon's report of 2007-10,
https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?106274
...
The other thing about marketing is, you need to send the right message to the right people. Unfortunately, that means the freedom rhetoric your home page is boasting is more of a turn off to would be users and developers than a selling point. That is not to say you should not advertise freedom, but rather, you should do it more strategically. More on that later. To attaract users at the first place, you need to market pragmatic advantages over the competition. Fortunately, the saving grace comes from the vast amount of glyphs in all 3 font families. Free Mono has more glyphs than Courier (374 chars), Courier by Linotype (248 chars), Courier PS (253 chars), Courier Line Draw (233 char), Monotype Courier 12 (253 chars); Free Sans has more glyphs than Helvetica Roman (388 chars), Helvetica World (1862 chars), Neue Helvetica (390 chars); Free Serif currently has more glyphs and support more code pages than even the Times New Roman 5.00 (Windows Vista version) (2790 chars), CG Times (249 chars), Times Std Roman (408 chars), Times Europa (253 chars). It is time to exploit these advantages against similar proprietary fonts for all they worth. However, keep in mind that quantity of characters are not the only benchmark of superiority, especially when the FreeFont families have uneven distributions of glyphs across variants. It is just a gateway to attract developers into refining the fonts in other areas, before the temporary edge is gone.
When dealing with fonts that need progress to catch up against the latest proprietary counterparts, the homepage should include progress chart, to inform users of the progress towards beating the competition, to create the impressions this project is capable to compete against commercial foundaries.
When dealing with freedom issue, remember that end users usually do not get hit by much, because they can simply get the non-free fonts with ease and virually no consequences. This message should be targeted to corporate customers, because they are the ones who cannot get away with copyright infringements. In the project homepage, information on freedom should put into a separate section, for corporate users. However, unless there is an active community for the Free UCS scalable fonts project, this particular feature should be in the footnote section, because you can't back up these users unless the font can compete in quality against the oppositions, and you can't compete against proprietary counterparts unless there is an active development community rather than the divided efforts in current state.
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