[projectaon] Re: Font substitutes
- From: Iain Smith <iainsmith@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 04:58:05 -0700 (PDT)
I've taken a lengthy look at several font sites, but anything remotely
resembling Zapf Elliptical / Melior is retail so can't be distributed.
As far as I can tell, Gungsuh isn't shipped with XP. The official list of
fonts shipped with XP is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/winxp.htm
It's not listed on the global font list either:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/default.aspx
Lucida Fax is listed and was apparently shipped with the following:
Access 97 SR2,
Office 97 Small Business Edition SR2,
Office 97 SR1a,
Office Professional Edition 2003,
Publisher 2000,
Publisher 97,
Publisher 98,
TrueType Font Pack (discontinued in the early nineties, so no longer available).
> IMHO the most important thing to check against are the numerals. There
> are a lot of fonts that look similar to Melior/Zapf Elliptical with a-z and
> A-Z,
> but the numerals are often wildly different from the original typeface.
I doubt I'll find anything fantastic in the free fonts area, they're mostly
novelty graphical fonts. The plain text fonts I've seen are nothing like the
Melior/Zapf Elliptical referred to earlier. Then again, in all the time I've
been reading the PA books it seems to have been defaulting to Georgia since I
don't have Souvenir installed either. Georgia's always been fine with me; I
always liked the look, and AFAIK it's shipped with Win2k, XP, and MacOS X (I
think it can also be applied to earlier versions of wind), but out of interest
I took a look at a few other fonts supplied with XP and compared them with
Melior.
http://www.projectaon.org/staff/iain/Fonts/Melior.gif
http://www.projectaon.org/staff/iain/Fonts/Georgia.gif
http://www.projectaon.org/staff/iain/Fonts/PalatinoLinotype.gif
http://www.projectaon.org/staff/iain/Fonts/Sylfaen.gif
I also like the look of Sylfaen, though again we'd hit the problem of not being
able to distribute the font ourselves, making it a pain for Linux and Mac
users, etc. As I see it, we have two three possible avenues:
1) For each supported platform, find a font shipped with the platform which
looks "right" and use these in the CSS (I know that Georgia is shipped with
IE4, Windows 2000, Windows XP and MacOS).
2) Trawl through the free fonts libraries until we find a font which it truly
free which can be ditributed and converted as required.
3) Create a Project Aon font, then we can do whatever we like with it. I have
created fonts in the past, but only very simple graphical ones that were never
intended for clarity for reading, so that would be a massive undertaking.
Something definitely worth thinking about though is the
Just kidding :)
Iain.
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