You might have heard of the GNOME project, or you might have heard that the GNOME project has been looking for some good quality fonts.
So what is GNOME and why should you care what it looks like?
A major difficulty with free operating systems like Linux is the user interface. There are two main projects to build a user interface for Linux: KDE and GNOME. Both provide something a little like a Macintosh or Windows environment. KDE is much more Windows-like, and GNOME is in some ways more mac like, in other ways more flexible.
The GNOME project has built a complete free and easy-to-use desktop environment for the user, as well as a powerful application framework for the software developer.
GNOME is part of the GNU project, and is free software (sometimes referred to as open source software.)
GNOME is included in pretty much every BSD and GNU/Linux distribution and works on many other Unix systems.
The interesting thing to me is that GNOME started with the GIMP, an image manipulation program a little like Adobe Photoshop. There is a Type 1 font editor called Gill, an SVG drawing editor (sodipodi, and no, I don't know what that means), and recently I started work on a page layout tool called gLayout.
Pango is also moving to multilingual multi-script font support using Pango; this supports openType as well as Type 1 and TrueType.
Fonts are the user interface of text. The legitimate freely available fonts today are generally very poor quality. There are some exceptions (URW donated a few, for example), but there's little that would make you want to go out and buy more fonts.
Even Times and Helvetica, ubiquitous since the Apple LaserWriter, are not freely available, so Linux users must use alternatives.
We have been offered some fonts that we can distribute freely. These are not Times and Helvetica replacements, but they include some beautiful text faces. There are licensing issues to sort out, including the use of a font format that isn't trivial to copy onto Windows - although people will certainly be able to do that with work, so I don't know if that's a good goal or not.
The GNOME foundation (which includes a number of major Unix vendors as well as free software developers and consultants) will be able to issue a press release, and I'm hoping that we can have links back to font foundries as part of Gnome.
The result will not just be better looking desktops: it will be an increase in awareness of typography and of fonts, and an opportunity to nurture a new design community.
Liam Quin, Barefoot Computing, 581 Lauder Ave.,
Toronto, ONT, Canada M6E 3J5
liam@holweb.net