h a l f b a k e r yTrying to contain nuts.
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Fontster
Share your f0ntz across the net | |
There is a vast volume of
free/shareware fonts floating around,
in all styles, and levels of quality.
I was thinking that something like
Napster for fonts could be a good
idea. Fonts could be catalogued
according to style (i.e., geometric,
blackletter, script), weight, width
and various
descriptive keywords.
That way, if you decide you want a
high-tech yet curvy, wide, bold font
for your new web site, you fire up
Fontster, enter these arguments (as
well as a few optional keywords, such
as, perhaps, "techno" or "organic")
and search for any matches. Matches
could even be sent with a
highly-compressed sample, saving you
from having to download the whole
font to see if you want it.
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Annotation:
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Although it sounds like a good idea, there's so many really cheap CDs of fonts around that I'm not sure it would take off. I may well be totally wrong. Gets a pastry anyway. |
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"Typeface as typeface" is not protected by copyright in the United States. |
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I may be missing something here. Aren't there a lot of sites which offer free download of hundreds of fonts and font packages, with descriptions and/or samples on view? |
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sorry, really really annoying thing for me here...... why fontster? i mean Napster (i'd imagine your source of name) is about music swapping not Nap (i dunno) swapping. why not something ambiguous so that if the fonts sharing failed you could use the same software + server for something else. |
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I would like to see this happen just for the "Eminem vs. Bodoni" and "Britney Spears vs. Futura" monstrosities it will spawn. But since I used to make a living designing fonts, which is by no means a profitable business, I'll have to say it shouldn't. (Not being a record company exec or musician, I have no problem with Napster.) |
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A centralized site with a well-maintained font search engine and samples of fonts (and maybe an ad-hoc typesetting service that returns a .PNG, given a text, font, and colors) would be a good idea. Something like "freshmeat" for fonts. |
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A decentralized Peer-To-Peer file swapping service as a specialization of gnutella would offer none of these things. There is nothing about this problem that requires peer-to-peer, either. There is no huge throughput; unlike music or informational texts, fonts are downloaded once, and used locally many times over. |
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I think "Freshmeat for fonts" sites do exist, though I don't think any of them are quite as well-done as one might like. |
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When people say "foo-ster", they usually seem to mean "something magic which gives me lots of foo for free". Pthbb. |
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I like. Croissants all around. |
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