Adobe's open source font experience [LWN.net]

Adobe's open source font experience

Posted Aug 29, 2013 4:50 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (guest, #32913)
Parent article: Adobe's open source font experience

Also, this

"Adobe created the Source Sans Pro font because the company has been
developing more open source software in recent years, and it needed
fonts that it could incorporate into its releases"

is dangerous nonsense. As if each application needed its own special
font to be recognized by! Why not do the right thing and let the user
choose one (or at most a very few) font for the entire "desktop"?
Consistency, what a concept!!

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Adobe's open source font experience

Posted Aug 29, 2013 13:37 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link] (2 responses)

Brackets is a web application; they can deliver a better font via @font-face, so the user experience is better. I'm not seeing what's wrong with that. While they could just omit it and fall back on the browser's default monospaced font, then you'd get things like Courier's indistinguishable 0/O and 1/l. That has nothing to do with having the font "be recognizable;" it's a straightforward usability feature.

Nate

Adobe's open source font experience

Posted Aug 30, 2013 6:24 UTC (Fri) by thedevil (guest, #32913) [Link] (1 responses)

"Brackets is a web application"

IMO, that does not fundamentally change the situation.

"it's a straightforward usability feature"

why not work on a font that is genrally usable as replacement for
Courier then? Or maybe I'm unfair and that's actually what they are
doing, but that is not what your article suggests.

Adobe's open source font experience

Posted Aug 30, 2013 13:51 UTC (Fri) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

Nothing stops you from using either of the fonts for any purpose you choose.

Nate