Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:49:00 +0100 From: VOICE News Service Subject: [VOICENWS] SW: Workplace Sans 0.6 and Workplace Sans Bold 0.2 released ++ From the VOICE OS/2-eCS News Service http://www.os2voice.org ++ From: alexDESPAM at DESPAMaltsan.org My TrueType fonts "Workplace Sans" version 0.6 and "Workplace Sans Bold" version 0.2 have been released (2009-11-12). http://users.socis.ca/~ataylo00/creative/fonts/workplace/index.html (Please note that the URL has changed slightly as I have reorganized the Fonts section of my website. The old URL is still valid, but now points to my top-level font page.) ABSTRACT Workplace Sans is a light semi-condensed sans-serif font, inspired by the OS/2 bitmap font "WarpSans". Intended primarily for use as a user interface font, it has been designed to resemble WarpSans as much as possible when displayed on-screen at 9pt/120dpi or 11pt/96dpi. Because Workplace Sans is hinted only very crudely, it looks best when anti-aliased under programs which are capable of doing so (such as OpenOffice, the Mozilla family, or applications which use the Innotek Font Engine). RELEASE NOTES Early versions of Workplace Sans put a great deal of effort into trying to force the glyphs to rasterize (in monochrome) as identically as possible to 9-point WarpSans. Since I have no way of hinting the font manually, I resorted to manipulating the glyph outlines themselves in order to achieve the effect I wanted. This resulted in some unorthodox letter shapes (mostly visible at larger sizes). At the time, very little consideration went into making the actual letters attractive on their own merit. Since Workplace Sans has now found itself adopted for use by various applications which use FreeType library for rendering text (such as Mozilla), it means that Workplace Sans is now much more likely than I originally envisioned to be used in an environment where it is antialiased by default. Therefore, I have recently engaged in a rethink of Workplace Sans's design principles. Specifically, I have decided to move away from my original obsession with exactly duplicating the appearance of WarpSans under binary rasterization, and am now concentrating instead on making the font more attractive when antialiased. Version 0.6 of Workplace Sans, and version 0.2 of Workplace Sans Bold, represent the first major implementation of this new design philosophy. The major changes are much more regular glyph shapes, and slightly tightened text spacing (mostly evident on larger point sizes). OTHER CHANGES Version 0.6 supports a great many more characters than version 0.5 (although still not quite as many as version 0.4). (The Bold version, however, still supports only Latin-1 and a few other characters.) A complete list of supported characters is available on the website above. The font weight classification of the "normal" version is now defined in the font header as "Book" (400), rather than "Light" (200) as previously. This change was made by request. Both the normal and bold versions have been built using TypeTool 2 instead of TypeTool 3 (which is where I do the actual development work). This was done to avoid problems with scaling and hinting which affect some environments when TT3 is used to build the font. Workplace Sans is now licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Alex Taylor Fukushima, Japan http://www.socis.ca/~ataylo00 -- For a choice in the future of personal computing, Join VOICE - http://www.os2voice.org [Moderator's note: All posts are sent without guarantee to the accuracy of the content. We try to verify details and URLs but this is an entirely volunteer run list, so 100% fact checking and the quality/useability of products announced here is impossible. If you respond to this post please remove the DESPAM from the poster's email addresses. Please do not send requests for information about a specific post to the moderator unless it is an update or I sent it.]