Given that Ascender is the official vendor for Microsoft's core fonts including the original Times, Arial and Courier, one wonders if they're utterly sick of those particular sets of metrics yet.
Ah, I guess Google just didn't like the GPLv2 licence attached to the Liberation fonts, and paid for them to be re-licensed.
That's a bit of a shame, I'd been looking forward to having a wider set of Free fonts but the Liberation family is not a thing anyone would choose to use if it weren't for the metrics-compatibility.
The person who wrote this article asserts that these fonts are “very much similar” to Times, Arial, and Courier, respectively. However, Times and Tino would never be categorized together (except that they are both serif fonts, but hey, there’s about a 50-50 chance of that). Cousine is also quite different from the typewriter-esque Courier.
Edit: As lambda points out, they have compatible metrics, so there shouldn’t be cases where layouts meant for one of {Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New} “break” by having content overflows on Chrome OS. (The team has also set up aliases for these relationships, besides setting the default "serif", "sans-serif", and "monospace" fonts.) Cool!
They are "very much similar" only in that they have compatible metrics. Thus, text typeset in Times, Arial, and Courier won't have to re-flow when using Tino, Arimo, and Cousine. You're absolutely right; the style of the fonts is quite different than the style of the one's they are intended to replace.
From the font info for Arimo:
Unique name Ascender - Arimo
Copyright Digitized data copyright (c) 2010 Google Corporation.
Trademark Arimo is a trademark of Google and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.
Description Arimo was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Arial™. Arimo offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.
License Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1
The biggest difference I see is in the monospace font. Courier is serif and Cousine is not. Serif fonts are good for coding but my guess is that anybody coding has a better font than Courier.
I understand that "why?" will probably be responded with "why not?" but I'm going to ask it anyway. What benefit does bringing in more fonts do? What is the advantage of using these fonts over the current free/open fonts, like Nimbus, Arial, Courier New, etc?
Ah, I see. I was going off memory that Arial existed in Open Office. After double-checking my sources (OpenOffice.org 3.2 running on Ubuntu 10.04.1) I see that I was incorrect in that. Nevermind, then.
Ubuntu doesn't ship it by default because of FOSS-wankery in the style of debian-legal — the Microsoft Core Fonts are perfectly free to redistribute in their original compressed form.
It does look a little nicer, from what I’ve seen so far; the cutoff on the lowercase "r", for example, is vertical instead of horizontal, bringing it closer in line with Helvetica.
What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces — in the eyes of the law they're just goddamn shapes. You hold copyright over the exact contents of the distributed file, and you can trademark the name, but you can't stop someone from making an exact clone independently.
Microsoft licensed the original "Core Fonts" from Monotype, who had already made Arial as a metrically equivalent clone of Linotype's Helvetica, but slightly different because they would otherwise get yelled at by their dork friends, and it was just one more in a large pool of other very similar fonts. Then later generations of dorks curse them for making it slightly different. Now Google has commissioned a new set of pointlessly-different fonts, which they will be yelled at for. It would have been better if they'd just made direct clones — they'd still get yelled at by the same people, but at least shit wouldn't look fucked up. The only problem would be finding someone willing to make them.
Pretty much all of the bullshit surrounding fonts on the web stems from FUD from the handful of type foundries and their fanboys. Maybe Google should buy Monotype to free fonts the way they bought On2 to free video codecs: http://www.google.com/finance?q=TYPE (as an added bonus they'd get Helvetica since Monotype now owns Linotype)
What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces
Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, themselves.
With the following paragraphs of your post I agree fully. As soon as something becomes so ubiquitous as Helvetica, it should fall in public domain. (Or someone should pay for it and give it to everyone else.) Helvetica is so beautiful, timeless, that it would deserve to be free.
Sorry about that, the introductory paragraph became unclear when I rearranged things.
We fully agree, I think it's awesome that typefaces are not IP — what I find fucked up is the present situation where everyone tiptoes around that fact and kowtows to the foundries, because anything less would be an affront to typography itself (ala 'hating the troops').
Upstart type nerds everywhere could legally be crafting better-implemented versions of Helvetica — but they aren't, because other type-nerds would beat them up for paying such an insult to the $300m corporation that owns the name.
> Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, themselves.
Yes, but they aren't allowed to distribute your program just by grepping your name out. You can basically do that with a font AFAIK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
Given that Ascender is the official vendor for Microsoft's core fonts including the original Times, Arial and Courier, one wonders if they're utterly sick of those particular sets of metrics yet.