Puppy needs a font pack

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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disciple
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Puppy needs a font pack

#1 Post by disciple »

Screen fonts have been discussed a lot in Puppy, but I think Puppy needs downloadable general purpose "paper" font packs. There are a lot of free (as in beer) fonts available, but it can be quite overwhelming finding them.

When I say general purpose, I mean a good selection of fonts for all sorts of different uses - kids' projects for school, birthday cards, posters, whatever.
e.g.
a couple of blackletter fonts
a couple of Celtic fonts
a couple of fancy cursive fonts
an informal handwriting font (like Comic Sans MS, but there are much better ones around)
a stencil font
a Western (as in cowboy) font
etc

Any volunteers?
Maybe I'll have to put one together when I find the time.

We would have to be careful with the licenses, e.g. there are a few open source fonts, some freeware fonts, and a lot of fonts that are free for personal, non-commercial use. Also some may not permit redistribution.

Maybe if people link to fonts they recommend it could be a good start. Note that I am not talking about a huge (hundreds) font pack, I am talking about maybe dozens, so we would want to include fonts that we think a reasonable proportion of people would actually use.

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Dingo
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#2 Post by Dingo »

Here are some gpl fonts I use on my system (license in included in zip file)

http://puppylover.netsons.org/dokupuppy ... rams:fonts

all fonts in page are:

- GPL licensed
- having a whole set (regular. italic, bold. bold italic)


next days I will add more and once I have completed I wil make also a bigger zip file with also single ttf fonts listed on page (all fonts in one zip file)
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disciple
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#3 Post by disciple »

It would be good to put screenshots or even a brief desciption when you have individual fonts for download, like on your page.
I don't think it would be necessary for a decent font "pack" though.

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#4 Post by Dingo »

disciple wrote:It would be good to put screenshots or even a brief desciption when you have individual fonts for download, like on your page.
I don't think it would be necessary for a decent font "pack" though.
Yes. I will Add a screenshot for all fonts in page (adf fontpack not need it. Zip file includes a pdf document with previews characters). Just give me some 'time :-)
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disciple
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#5 Post by disciple »

Cool. Thanks 8)
link to just the pdf for the adf font pack: http://pagesperso-orange.fr/arkandis/AD ... _V1-08.pdf

You are doing something different from what I'm suggesting, as those seem to all be relatively conventional serif and sans-serif fonts.
I think that more than needing a lot of subtle variation in conventional fonts, we need a font pack with very different fonts. In fact, a lot of people can be overwhelmed by having a lot of similar fonts, so if I put a pack together it would not include a lot of that sort of thing.
What you are doing is probably helpful as well, as long as you have thought about exactly what you are doing, and how it is useful :) It seems you are making it easy to find open source fonts from different sources?

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#6 Post by Dingo »

disciple wrote:think that more than needing a lot of subtle variation in conventional fonts, we need a font pack with very different fonts.
Yeah. I have added another section miscellaneous

http://puppylover.netsons.org/dokupuppy ... eous_fonts

that contains several fonts (GPL licensed), having not a full set (regular, bold, italic, bold italic), but many different styles. I will add and expand section more and more in next days
disciple wrote:It seems you are making it easy to find open source fonts from different sources?
Yeah, I'm a GPL fonts addicted 8) and in past years I have spent lot of time to looking for GPL fonts, so, now I can collect together all fonts downloaded

I think that fonts for puppy must have GPL license not only free for personal use, so I try to looking for in my hard disk only free gpl, public domain fonts
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disciple
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#7 Post by disciple »

I think that fonts for puppy must have GPL license not only free for personal use,
Yes, obviously you wouldn't want to include "free for personal use" fonts in a pack with GPL fonts, but there are also "free for anything" fonts that aren't open source, and in spite of the open source purists, I think the freeware movement is a good thing too.
What you are doing though is very valuable, as when I was looking I couldn't find anywhere with sort of a centralised index of the different places you can find open source fonts.

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#8 Post by Todd »

The latest font to be released in association with Linux has been the Liberation fonts from Red Hat. "This license for the Liberation fonts adds several clauses to the base GPL." (Wikipedia.org) The fact that Red Hat felt the need to add said clauses brings into question the efficacy of using any GPL font without them. Personally, I am going to stick with the Bitstream Vera based fonts. They are proprietary, but with a very liberal license which allows the changing of the fonts as long as you don't call them Bitstream or Vera and you include their copyright.

It seems the problem with using GPL fonts is that they make your document GPL. Now, a question I have yet to have answered, is if use of a GPL word processor makes the document GPL.

Back to the main theme of this particular discussion. I have searched the internet. The main source of GPL fonts is Ghostscript. Most of those fonts have been included in Puppy. Fonts based on Bitstream Vera are not decorative (caligraphic, script, et cetera). The liberation fonts, in my humble opinion, are just plain ugly. The one bright light in fonts has been the Open Font License (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL). Debian, the Free Software Foundation and others seem to be backing their approach. Their repository of fonts can be found at http://scripts.sil.org/FontDownloads.

Sincerely,

Todd

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rastapax
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rastapax

#9 Post by rastapax »

I am working on a set of icons to improve the interface without increasing weight if puppy

Is my small contribution

respect to fon i think
the ideal

micrograma or eurostyle good font

http://www.12design.cl/puppy
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 096#183096
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disciple
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#10 Post by disciple »

OK, but I think you should post those icons in another thread, as they have nothing to do with fonts, so no one will know they are here.

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#11 Post by disciple »

Wow - that Matt dude is awesome!
I don't think much of his other fonts, but those tiny Macintosh bitmap fonts are fantastic! I always knew the bitmap was mightier than the TrueType, but wow! Who would have imagined a Gothic font looking that good that small?!!
I'm still not quite sure what it is useful for though :)

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#12 Post by disciple »

OK, this page has a lot of good links (and not so good)
http://www.geocities.com/hartke01/

And I just discovered that you can view fonts by license type here:
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=601#null

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#13 Post by Todd »

I have posted the package bitstream-vera.pet at http://www.toddrichardson.com/archive/. Once you install the Bitstream Vera package, the three fonts that are included become the default.

Todd

disciple
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See all the Debian fonts

#14 Post by disciple »

I only just noticed that you can see all the fonts in Debian at http://fonts.debian.net/
We could have a huge fonts.sfs :)
Do you know a good gtkdialog program? Please post a link here

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#15 Post by Lobster »

SFS would be good
I could not wait :oops:

Downloaded the larger of the two zips
extracted and placed here
/usr/share/fonts/default/TTF/

Fontified!

NB. On initial load you might have slowed some programs
that use fonts
Second load will be faster - I can live with 2 seconds for write on second load - however this may depend on memory and CPU speed - I have 1 Gig mem and a 64 bit Athlon 5000mz)
So there may be a price to pay on slower hardware. Be interested how others get on, SFS etc . . .
A lot of the fonts are non-english language (not sure - they display
as numbers in boxes - usually language scripts)
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#16 Post by pa_mcclamrock »

pa_penguins_favorite_free_fonts: available through PETget from Official Puppy 4 repository; has blackletter, Celtic, fancy cursive, and more:

Image
It's stupid to use inferior software for ideological reasons.
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cthisbear
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#17 Post by cthisbear »

pa_mcclamrock :

Does that make you the font of knowledge?

Anyway..............good job.

Chris.

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sullysat
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#18 Post by sullysat »

The fun fonts pack found at http://thelinuxbox.org/?page_id=3 is what I load on all my linux boxes.

I'm not sure if this is what you guys are looking for, but it appears to have the right licensing and the variety is awesome.

Sully
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#19 Post by sullysat »

pa_mcclamrock wrote:pa_penguins_favorite_free_fonts: available through PETget from Official Puppy 4 repository; has blackletter, Celtic, fancy cursive, and more:
Hey Pa... sorry, couldn't resist... anyway,

This is not the first time I've read that something is available in the official repository. I'm missing something though, because when I open the package manager in 4.0 (which is MUCH less versatile than the version in 3.01, IMO), the packages that I read should be there aren't.

Is there a way to update the listing? Other options or commands I should know but don't? A way to learn how to use PETget through the command line more efficiently?

Not trying to hijack the thread.. I'm very interested in the font issue, but this reminded me that I find much more useable 'stuff' in places other than the 'official' repositories and that just doesn't seem right.

Sully

disciple
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#20 Post by disciple »

Great pa!
Do you know a good gtkdialog program? Please post a link here

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