Quote:
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Originally Posted by ath
The pages you link to also suggest that these are *not* original fonts, but clones: Not Palatino but URW Palladio, not Times but Nimbus, etc.
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(full disclosure: my day job is with
www.myfonts.com where we sell all these fonts.)
Taking a look at the actual font names in the PDF:
- actual font name ("pretty" font name): origin
- URWGothicL (Avant Garde): URW++
- URWBookmanL (Bookman): URW++
- CharterBT (Charter): Bitstream
- NimbusSanL (Helvetica): URW++
- LMSansQuotation8 (Latin Modern): original TeX font
- CenturySchL (New Century Schoolbook): URW++
- URWPalladioL (Palatino): URW++
- NimbusRomNo9L (Times): URW++
- Utopia (Utopia): Linotype or Monotype
All these fonts are legally legitimate. Bitstream and URW++ are two of the big old-skool digital typefoundries that sprang up in the 1980s as PC-based desktop publishing developed. Both of these companies' font libraries are largely made up of legally-authorized "clones" but in most cases the quality is comparable to the "name brand" fonts they imitate.
I think the bigger issue in this particular font list is the age of the fonts in question. The "L" at the end of all those URW++ fonts indicates that these are very old fonts, probaly early 1990s (the "L" stands for "LaserWriter"), definitely pre-Unicode and probably deficient in modern character sets as ath suspects.
Another issue for fonts on the Sony Reader is getting fonts that look good at low resolution. This is no minor task -- most fonts look crappy at small size at screen resolutions -- so it's a good idea to stick to the classics for these applications. I agree with ath here too: Avant Garde was never meant to be a text face at all. Charter or Palatino would be my suggestions as well for serif, and Helvetica for sans. Additionally, for sans you might want to consider those good old Windows standbys, Verdana or Tahoma (or the new Vista font Segoe) which are highly optimized for readability at low resolutions.
The optimal solution would be to actually purchase licenses for recent versions of each font. They are only $20-$30 each and the standard license allows installation on 5 computers, as well as read-only PDF embedding.