Think about fonts

Almost everybody creating media has to deal with them sooner or later: fonts. But what if you're like me and don't want to depend on Adobe, Apple or Windows? And maybe you even want to be free to use them anywhere and as often as you like! Fortunately there are a couple of projects that focus on making your free font life easier: ... * Openfontlibrary is a good starting point to get some fonts under the open font licence * Fontmatrix is a feature rich font manager (seems to run on windows and mac, too) * Fontforge even lets you edit or create font files by your own * Inkscape's path capabilities are great to tweak fonts * Scribus is the desktop publishing part that puts your fonts in books and brochures

But unfortunately this is not enough to be happy. Openfontlibrary has way too few good fonts to offer and lacks a web-based font preview. Fontmatrix could be more stable and should update activated fonts in Inkscape, Scribus or GIMP on the fly.

Finally I was pondering lately: Why does the free (as in freedom) approach to fonts not lead to innovation in terms of font handling? - Imagine you could legally embed your fonts in every filetype (Inkscape, Scribus, OpenOffice, GIMP, ...) and cut out the painful experience of searching for some crazy font that somebody used to have on his machine.

After all I'm glad with the current progress because it's possible to combine freedom and fonts.