Linux world news

Free Chinese TrueType Fonts Released

Due to the huge number of characters a Chinese font contains, and due to the complex shape of each character, there are very few free Chinese fonts. But the recent release of version 1.0 of the new cwTeX TrueType font package by Tsong-Min Wu, Tsong-Huey Wu and Edward G.J. Lee gives users some useful options. The package includes five TrueType fonts converted from the cwTeX Chinese Type 1 font, which in turn integrates Alexej Kryukov's CM-LGC font, and Koanughi Un and Won-kyu Park's Korean font. So it actually is a CJK font suitable for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Latin characters as used in the English alphabet are also supported. The compressed tarball is a huge 57Mbytes and contains the Ming font cwming.ttf, the Kai font cwkai.ttf, the FangSong font cwfs.ttf, the bold Hei font cwheib.ttf and the Yen font cwyen.ttf, all licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 or later. The fonts can also be installed under Windows (including Windows XP SP2), which makes them suitable for cross-platform applications such as OpenOffice. The distribution combines two variants of each font. The "center" directory contains a version where the output is centered to reflect the traditional Chinese top-down writing style, whereas the "baseline" directory provides a variant that applies English style alignment. The latter is more suitable when Chinese and English characters are juxtaposed on a horizontal display. http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~ntut019/cwtex/cwtex.html http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-lgc/ http://kldp.net/projects/unfonts/ http://cle.linux.org.tw/fonts/cwttf/ ftp://cle.linux.org.tw/pub2/fonts/cwttf/ ftp://ftp.tnc.edu.tw/pub/cwttf/

Celebrate Croatian Creative Commons Licenses!

Compared to the noise that license issues usually raise in the open source and free software world, the introduction of Creative Commons licenses adapted to match national legal systems is typically a remarkably smooth process. The official launch of the Croatian version on January 14 means that the free licenses, which are suitable for any kind of creative work and not just source code, have now been localized to reflect 13 different legal systems. The Croatian launch in the city of Zagreb, inaugurated by "Mr. Creative Commons", Lawrence Lessig himself, was accompanied by a Free Culture festival, aiming to promote the production of free and open content and presented attractive examples of freely distributable artwork. The most exciting part of the program which drew the attention of a broader public was a musical performance. Artists from the local "EGOBOO.bits" label, who have been publishing their work under the GNU GPL for the past three years, together with their guests from UK-based Loca records, celebrated this new opportunity to release their music under more suitable licenses. The first artist to actually release work under the newly launched licenses was video artist Ana Husman. In addition to performances, the festival included an exhibition at the location of the former "Borba" ("struggle") printing plant. Apart from some rather old and traditional pieces of artwork to illustrate archiving tendencies, the exhibition really didn't look much like a a traditional art museum with tangible exhibits. Instead it turned out to be a virtual museum of digital technologies where visitors were invited to perform activities typical of a printing plant, such as putting on overalls and trying their hand at screen printing, photocopying, CD burning or even ironing! http://www.slobodastvaralastvu.net/FrontPageEn http://www.egoboobits.net/ http://www.locarecords.com/ http://www.mi2.hr/ http://creativecommons.org/

City of Angels, City of Open Source?

5.8 million USD within three months - this is too high a price for software licenses, even in a mega-city like Los Angeles. This sum of money, which was spent on proprietary software in Q4 2003, might be better invested in boosting the city's police force. This was the motion put forward by city council members Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel and Jack Weiss on February 2, who suggested a simple way of releasing these funds: open source. "Free open source software can be as capable and more secure than products that cost the city millions", says Garcetti, who is trying out OpenOffice privately. And Greuel, Chair of the Audits and Governmental Efficiency committee, adds: "Money that should be going to pay for ambulance service and police officers." The City's Information Technology Agency (ITA) will be reporting within 30 days on whether and how this can be done. It seems likely that this report will dampen the city counselors' hopes that "free support [...] available on Internet message boards" will be able to help cut costs dramatically. It might even add migration costs to the bill. But it does seem likely that the city's Apache Tomcat servers will not be the only open source based computers in the long run. Clerks at about 42,000 communal workplaces are eager to find out. http://www.lacity.org/council/cd13/cd13press/cd13cd13press13227121_02022005.pdf