June 23, 2003
Check me out in IE
Ok, just a quick test to see whether or not it was possible to create fonts, and embeddable fonts, using free software. I was able to create fonts in Linux using The Gimp and pfaedit. The tutorial at pfaedit's website pretty much explains the entire process. It was extremely easy to use once I got autotrace installed in my Linux box as well. I then used Microshaft's free tool called WEFT to create the embeddable font that you see here in this blog (that is, if you are viewing this page in IE). Follow MS's instructions on how to add the embeddable font in your CSS of your webpage/blog and you're set. Mind you, I did this all using open-source or FREE software (well, almost free, you have to have a Windows install to run WEFT, but at least WEFT is free). Nice isn't it? Well, ok, I agree, the fonts needs more work, but it's readable right? I hope so. Anyway, again, this is just a first run to see if creating fonts with free tools was possible. I don't really like the way it looks, but had to show it off anyway. I'm probably going to change it back to the way it was soon.
Update: The font is quite ugly! Hinting (quality of the font at small point sizes) for the font is very bad. But here's a screenshot of what it would have looked like:
Well, seems like it doesn't work for IE either. Something with WEFT -- stupid program is useless, why can't it just do plain conversion from TTF to EOT? I'll just upload a screenshot.
Posted by: John on June 23, 2003 01:20 PM