Live from Austin!

1. Calumny
2. Candelabra
3. Colonic
4. Cabalist
5. Canker
6. Capitulate
7. Cadaver
8. Cornhole
9. Catamite
10. Colostomy

Seriously, though, who thought it would be a good idea to give them all nondescript one-word names beginning with ‘C’?

When Apple launched Mac OS X, they made a big thing about its typographical capabilities. To show off the new type rendering engine, they licensed and bundled…

More than $1,000 of the best fonts available today, including Baskerville, Herman Zapf’s Zapfino, Futura, and Optima; as well as the highest-quality Japanese fonts available, in the largest character set ever on a personal computer.

It’s interesting to contrast this with Microsoft’s approach. Back when they launched Windows, they needed some fonts too. Since every laser printer on the planet (and most non-laser printers) had Helvetica and Times in, it would have been really useful if Windows had had Helvetica too. Macintoshes at the time shipped with Times and Helvetica, and it enabled them to display on screen a reasonable facsimile of what you would get on printout.

Of course, doing what Apple had done and actually licensing the fonts wasn’t an option. Bill Gates didn’t get to be as rich as he is today by paying people for the use of their intellectual property. Instead, Microsoft got a couple of knock-off fonts made by Monotype that were close enough—Times New Roman and Arial. In the case of Arial, the emulation was painstaking, right down to using the exact same character and stroke widths for every symbol.

Much the same happened with Microsoft Office. Microsoft saw a font they rather liked—Hermann Zapf’s Palatino—so they called in Monotype to make a quick copy. The result was named Book Antiqua, and bundled with Office.

Unlike Helvetica, however, Palatino was a wholly original design by a living designer. Hermann Zapf got rather angry, and Microsoft agreed to license Palatino retrospectively.

With Microsoft, history has a way of repeating itself. The forthcoming (some day) Windows Vista has a font called Segoe, used for all user interface elements. Microsoft recently filed for a visual trademark on Segoe, to try and ensure that nobody else would be able to use the font in their logotypes or software. Because, you know, everyone wants the caché of looking like Windows.

Unfortunately, some spoilsports at Linotype noticed that Segoe (as shipped in the Vista betas) was almost identical to the font Frutiger Next, designed in 1997 by Adrian Frutiger for use on signage in Munich. Microsoft had tweaked the tail on the ‘Q’, added a baseline to the ‘1′, left everything else identical, and then filed for a trademark as if the font was their own original design.

The European Union denied the application. Microsoft attempted to appeal, arguing that Linotype hadn’t actually sold Frutiger Next. Unfortunately, Frutiger is a very popular font, and the evidence of its Next variant’s existence prior to 2005 was overwhelming. Denied! Microsoft must pay all the lawyers’ fees for Heidelburger Druckmaschinen AG, aka Linotype.

Frutiger is very similar to Adobe Myriad, designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly. Consensus seems to be that Myriad is original enough to not be considered a rip off, however. Myriad is used by Apple for their corporate publications (replacing Apple Garamond), and is also used by my team at IBM. It’s worth noting that Apple license the font from its owners, and I use a legal licensed copy too.

So…will Microsoft license Frutiger or Myriad? Or will they tweak Segoe some more?

Fedora Core 1 died, so I installed the latest rev of the corporate desktop based on something else… which means I’m stuck with GNOME, as there aren’t any working KDE installs I can find.

With KDE it was really easy to install fonts. Almost Mac-like, in fact. Open the fonts window in Konqueror, drag the TrueType and Type 1 font files in, drop. Done.

In GNOME, I open my directory of fonts. The file manager previews them for me. I can double-click them to see them previewed larger. However, the preview doesn’t have any kind of install button, nor does the contextual menu for the files have an install option.

GNOME doesn’t seem to have any kind of font installer either. The “Font” control panel lets you select rendering options and which fonts to use for the UI, but it doesn’t actually tell you how to install fonts. The system Control Center doesn’t include anything for installing fonts either, though it does helpfully include an icon to open itself from within itself. Aaargh.

The GNOME help is useless too. It has four entries for “font”. One is about how to import fonts into Ghostscript, two are about importing and exporting TeTeX fonts, and the fourth one suggests that the way to install fonts is to edit /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

So I tried that, and discovered that the file had a comment saying no, don’t edit /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, instead edit /etc/fonts/local.conf. So I tried that, only to find that it was a mostly empty raw XML file. In particular, it didn’t mention any of the additional fonts the system already had installed, so it was clearly the wrong place.

So I tried Google and searched for an FAQ on how to install fonts in GNOME. First up was the GNOME end-user documentation on fonts. It talks about “subpixel decimation” and “GASP tables” and how to access someone’s CVS server to download a font viewer, but totally fails to mention how to install a font. At the very bottom of the page it finally mentions that GNOME’s font selection is handled by something called fontconfig.

So, off I go to the fontconfig site, and to what they laughably call their user documentation. Hey, look, it’s that fonts.conf man page again.

OK, back to Google. I find a reference to gnome-font-install. Sensible name, but (a) it turns out to be something specific to printing, and not actually a font installer; and (b) it isn’t on my system according to locate.

Time for a different approach. I search for how to install fonts for xfs (the X font server) instead, and find out that there’s a tool called chkfontpath, which actually installs fonts in the font path rather than only doing what its name suggests. So, I pull up the man page. Looks good. % chkfontpath -a /opt/coolfonts.

chkfontpath: error opening /opt/coolfonts/fonts.dir, unwilling to add path

Back to the man page. Yes, chkfontpath needs some sort of special fonts.dir file, says right there at the bottom, before completely failing to mention what the file should contain. Is there a man page for fonts.dir? No. Is the file fonts.dir even mentioned in the xfs man page? Is it fuck.

Finally I find a web page that explains the hoops you have to jump through to install fonts in GNOME. First you have to use ttmkfdir to prepare the directory containing your fonts. Obviously I didn’t find this in my searches, because it has no fucking manual page.

Having done that, you can then run mkfontdir to generate the mysterious undocumented fonts.dir file. Obviously I didn’t find that either, because it doesn’t show up on man -k fonts.dir. Yes, I know, it’s unreasonable of me to expect that a program whose sole purpose is to generate a file fonts.dir should actually mention fonts.dir in its man page index.

Having done that, it was indeed trivial to go back and run chkfontpath and actually install the fonts.

I now understand that when people say Linux isn’t ready for the desktop, it’s because they run GNOME.

It’s not just the lack of a friendly installer that makes me angry; it’s the fact that at every step of the way, the documentation is utterly useless at describing how to do the most basic task a user needs to do, yet describes itself as user documentation.