[3708] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Fonts available for Mozilla on Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Jan 17 18:26:10 2003
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Jeff Reed <jlreed@mit.edu>
Cc: web-team-internal@mit.edu, alexp@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20030115121403.01ee91d8@hesiod>
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Date: 17 Jan 2003 18:26:03 -0500
Message-Id: <1042845963.13935.75.camel@tokata.mit.edu>
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To be historically correct, when online typeography was made popular by
PostScript, the Merganthaler-Linotype corporation explicitly licensed
Times and Helvetica to Adobe. My understanding is that Microsoft
ignored that work and came in later with their careful integration of
fonts they had control over, Verdana and Arial.
I'm pretty familiar with the Arial situation, and I suspect the same
applies to Verdana.
The present situation is that Windows has well-integrated Arial font. I
think, at long last Macintosh does too. But under Linux, and I suspect
other versions of UNIX the Arial integration is so bad that the Mozilla
release notes give special instructions for ripping it out so that
something acceptable displays.
I think the correct statement of policy you should offer is not,
"Add a sans-serif font that is available on Athena to your style
sheets."
Instead the correct statement of policy should be:
"Make sure the platform-independent helvetica font is in your style
sheets."
My old friend Jim Gettys one of the elder statesmen of the X window
system was seen talking about further improvements to how X does fonts
for the future. Perhaps, at that future point, Microsoft's Helvetica
replacement, Arial, will be available to all.
-wdc
On Wed, 2003-01-15 at 12:25, Jeff Reed wrote:
> Hi Bill,
>
> Alex Prengal suggested I contact you after I asked him a question about
> available fonts for the Mozilla browser on Athena. This question of fonts
> arose in a Web Communications Services (WCS) meeting. The majority of the
> Web sites being designed for our MIT clients are using Verdana, Arial or
> another sans-serif font. We are constantly reminding them to add a
> sans-serif font that is available on Athena to their style sheets. Is it
> possible to add Verdana, Arial or both to the fonts available on
> Athena? If so, how do we go about adding those?
>
> If there is someone else I should be asking this question to, please let me
> know.
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
> -Jeff
>
>
> Jeff Reed - Web Consultant
> MIT Web Communication Services
> Email: jlreed@mit.edu
> Tel: 617-258-0278
> MIT Building N42-040c
>
