Tahoma font

[Jan Zerebecki]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 09:45:16PM +0000, Louis Lenders wrote:
> Brian Vincent <brian.vincent <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > 1.  What happened to the ROS version of Tahoma?
> 
> I didn't know they had one. Could someone ask if it exists (and could be merged)

I asked in #reactos on freenode and kjk_hyperion answered my
questions. The only current way is to use the Microsofts core
fonts ( http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ ) that are
redistributable in unmodified form. Reactos had a Tahoma
replacement in the works, called "Greenville" by Wierd Wierd (
wierd_w at yahoo.com
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/Wierd_W ). (Comments on his
work: "he was doing a really good job too"; "very distinctive
look".) He seems to have stopped working on it, because neither
hinting (the patented thing) nor as a fallback embedded bitmaps
worked correctly / good enough. It seems that there is a freetype
problem remaining with subpixel rendering (see that linked wiki
page for more info). It looks as if he has the font ready, so
perhaps someone should ask him nicely if he releases that font. I
guess fixing that freetype problem would help, thu perhaps not
easy.

Another problem might be that he didn't use fontforge to create
the font, but some comercial, expensive tool. So we wouldn't be
able to "build" the font from source.


> > 2.  Anyone know the legal ramifications of tracing glyphs?  It's
> > alluded to on fontforge's web page.

I guess tracing glyphs should be avoided as it could be seen as
copying. More so because we don't need a replacement font to
looks that similar.



Jan