User's guide needs free fonts

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum]

Recently, I got some flack for using the GNU FDL as the license for the Ikarus Scheme User's Guide and the points made seem to be valid. However, to do this properly, the fonts used in the document need to be replaced by "Free" fonts: ones that can be distributed freely so that others can TeX the document without screwing up the formatting. Currently, I use some fonts that ship on the Mac and are not available on other platforms.

If you feel strongly about this, please help. I need two truetype fonts: one for the text and one for the code. The fonts should be freely redistributable, they should look nice when viewed on the screen and when in print, and should come in the usual variety (italics, bold, bold-italics, etc etc). The monospaced font is very important for code listing and should be legible (easily distinguish 0 and O, I, l, and 1, etc etc) and should not be called "Courier".

I don't have the energy for hunting for fonts, so if you know of fonts that meet the above criteria, please share a link or two.

Thanks.

[jhoechtl (johann-hoechtl)]

I know of this two, both are "free"

DejaVu:
TTF: http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

URW Fonts (AKA "Postscript fonts")
TTF: ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/AFPL/GhostPCL/urwfonts-1.41.tar.bz2

Never had my hands on a mac. This two fonts are in ttf, don't know wheter a mac handels ttf, otf or still type1 fonts.

Johann

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

Dejavu-mono looks promising for the code listings but I have
to try it in action. For the main text, I'm leaning towards
CharisSIL right now.
http://scripts.sil.org/CharisSIL_Technical

The SIL Gentium and Doulos fonts are awesome too.

Thanks.

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

On Dec 4, 2007, at 3:22 PM, jhoechtl wrote:

> DejaVu:
> TTF: http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

The DejaVu Sans Mono looks bad for Scheme code. The parentheses are
not cuddly, the brackets are not aligned properly, and the underscore
is too thin.

Try the following ([_Il1oO0]) in

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/apple/monaco/

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

Changed to CharisSIL and Inconsolata. Inconsolata needs a small hack to lift the parenthesis a couple of points up.

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

This bug report is about to be closed as the fix comitted
previously will be incorporated in the next 0.0.3 release of
Ikarus Scheme, scheduled for January 31, 2008. A release
candidate tarball is available for download from:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~aghuloum/ikarus/ikarus-0.0.3-rc1.tar.gz
Please do test it if you have the time and report any issues
you might encounter. Thank you very much for your support.
(Sorry for the duplicates; I'm updating every open bug.)