I splashed out for a physical book; "The Non-Designerr’s Design Book" by Robin Williams, and promptly read it every spare moment till it was finished, then reread some bits. I'm now slightly less "visually illiterate", and have been busy improving websites, peoples CVs, and anything else I can lay my hands on. Still I think our web designer is safe for a few years, at least as far as the aesthetic questions are concerned.

If nothing else I now know why the D-A sites by-line doesn't work. It is so crying out to be in typeface "Steve", on nominative determinism grounds alone, never mind that it will contrast better with the main titles font. Okay probably no one else will ever see it, but we Debian users would know. As for the rest of D-A, urm, well the content is good.

Some people seem to think software wants to be free (as in liberty), but fonts want it even more. You want free fonts, so that you can be reasonably sure what a web page will look like to others, by shipping the font with the page if needed (free redistribution is the key here).

Fonts already have their "DRM" analog in MS Windows. A number of Truetype fonts can't be packaged in Powerpoint because they carry a copyright flag. Older versions of Powerpoint would silently omit these fonts a truely stupid behaviour (I wonder how many presentations started with the discovery of this, and the cursing of Microsoft, I remember one BCS meeting I was very glad I had my laptop with me for this very reason). Newer versions of Powerpoint deign to tell you they are leaving them out.

Some other non-Microsoft applications refuse to package these same fonts, other applications I've seen refuse to accept novel fonts embedded in documents in case there are copyright issues with these fonts, and so break the authors intended presentation (often needlessly).

You might think fonts just need "free redistribution rights" for display, but no the recipient might want to edit the document "free distribution rights for use of the font".

Okay, but no one needs to adapt fonts right? Remember mstcorefonts, Microsoft realising people need the same fonts to make things look right shipped a zip file, but because of the restrictions they put on redistribution you still have to take the fonts in exactly the same ZIP file, and have some complex processing to make them useable on other platforms. Similarly when we all change font types in the future either these fonts will be lost, or we'll have to retain some unzip tool, and TTF to NEWFONT converter forever (well until the Microsoft copyright expires, which might be forever at current trends in copyright period).

Modification, surely no one needs to modify the strokes of the fonts but the author? Remember the Euro? The development of Unicode? There may be many reasons to add characters, or correct issues, being locked into the copyright holder for this is not clever.

So an ideal font would give us the rights to; use, adapt, modify, redistribute, itself, remind you of anything? Perhaps Stallman was struggling too hard with the recipe analogy.

Although fonts have a very different work/reward balance, that may make it harder to get them created under free licences in the first place. Still next time you decide you need a font, try and order it under a sensible licence.

Now back to figuring the best way to get all the free fonts in Debian that an English speaker might want to use installed. I could install every "ttf-*" package, but that seems a bit crude. Any I'm missing?

dustin           sjfonts             ttf-gentium         ttf-sil-doulos
freefont         StayPuft.ttf        ttf-mgopen          ttf-summersby
Isabella.ttf     ttf-bitstream-vera  ttf-mph-2b-damase
linux-libertine  ttf-dejavu          ttf-sil-abyssinica
openoffice       ttf-f500            ttf-sil-charis