Andreas Raab wrote:

>Hi Guys,
>
>I just noticed that installing the update 5677InstallAccuFonts entirely
>*kills* the original Apple fonts. Is this intentional? If so, why?
>

Yes, killing the Apple fonts was intentional.  This was done for purely 
license-related reasons.  The idea was that this would allow us to 
create a sublicense of Squeak-L at some point in the future with the 
fonts clause removed, since the clause would no longer be relevant if 
there were no Apple fonts in the release.  This has been discussed in 
the past... most folks (including Andrew I believe) thought it was a 
good idea.

>I can see
>why we may want to have the Accu fonts as the default fonts but I don't see
>any reason whatsoever to have the Apple fonts no longer available at all.
>After all, they are much nicer than the Accu fonts, and personally, I would
>rather like to use the Apple fonts than the Accu fonts.
>  
>

Well, the Accu-NY font is very similar to the Apple NewYork font, only 
not as good. ;-)  But seriously, it is nearly identical, except there 
are some weirdnesses with some Accu-NY character widths IMHO, such as 
some punctuation characters (period, comma, etc.) having too much 
whitespace around them.  (Perhaps someone could tweak these?  I don't 
think anything in the Accufonts license forbids us from tweaking the 
fonts?)  Also, I guess Accu-NY comes in some different sizes, so a 
couple of the original New York sizes are no longer available. (e.g. the 
former window titlebar font)

Now, there were also the Comic bitmap fonts which were removed, which 
did not really have a close equivalent in the Accufonts... you may be 
referring more to these.  (The replacement used for these was Accujen, 
which is at least sans-serif.)  The Comic fonts were actually not Apple 
fonts, but fonts "borrowed" from MS.  So, there was no Squeak-L related 
reason to remove these, but they were also removed simply because they 
weren't legitimate free fonts.  However, there is some question as to 
whether bitmap fonts are copyrightable at all, apparently there are 
recent rulings indicating that they are not, so you could make the 
argument that the Comic bitmap fonts should have been left alone.  I 
decided to go along with the original StableSqueak decision to remove 
them, though... seemed like the safer course of action.  Do people think 
that we should re-add these fonts?

Anyway, one thing that someone should probably do is create a package 
registered on SM which installs the old Apple/MS fonts for people who 
want to use them.

In other news, I'm looking at creating a .cs from the Bitstream Vera sar 
install, so then we'll have these TrueType fonts too.  This would 
involve getting rid of the current "ComicSansMS" TrueType font, which 
should definitely be removed because TrueType fonts are copyrightable 
and that is not a free font.

- Doug