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Originally Posted by chrissam42
Has anyone tried the free Bitstream Vera fonts?
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These have also been extended as the "Deja Vu" font set
www.dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page , with several added styles and more international characters (including Cyrillic). These seems pretty good, similar to the basic Windows fonts.
Here is a link
http://www.geocities.com/hartke01/ to a list of free fonts and tools.
In terms of legibility, I've tried the Deja Vu Sans Condensed Bold, which is quite legible. However, it has a "Boldface" bit set (or something) so Word will not allow boldface properties to be applied to it. If this could be fixed (or even,for embedding, if the "bold" bit is ignored by the Reder's rendering), then using the bolder version of these fonts might be a good start.
As for the idea I started the thread with, I did some research into the OpenType font system and the TrueType fonts. The OpenType algorithms and tables that are in the font files cannot be directly used to scale the face: the point size and display resolution are used to calculate "pixels per em", and the glyphs in the fonts are encoded with coordinated of fractiona "em"s. The scaling for the coordinates can only be changed be a power of 2 for a TrueType font. So creating a font that displays larger than specified would mean enlarging each glyph and changing kerning and other tables. Probably it would be easier to patch something in the Reader software, unless there is a font tool out there that can do this scaling.