Re: Replacement suggestions for Century Schoolbook?

[Alexander Kobel]

On 01/08/2013 12:23 PM, Urs Liska wrote:
> Am 07.01.2013 10:14, schrieb Urs Liska:
> > Dear community,
> >
> > I'd like to collect some suggestion for a replacement font for Century
> > Schoolbook.
> Hi all,
>
> thank you for your diverse suggestions. [...]
> But I'd still be pleased by further suggestions.

Hi Urs,

I've got one more hint, namely one I already gave to Jan-Peter Voigt 
about a year ago (at 
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2011-11/msg00316.html>, 
partially German, then later pushed back to the list):
> If you can, I also highly recommend that you get a cheap old version
> of the CorelDRAW suite (v6 or higher, I think, but just search the web
> to find out) on eBay or the like.
> It comes with a collection of about a thousand font variants,
[nowadays more, I think,]
> including ones with proper condensed shapes. A good share of these
> fonts are of pretty good quality, though I heard that serious
> typographers would beat me up for saying so. They may not have
> excellent hinting or headline variants, but I find them very suitable
> for some lyrics.
> You'll probably get TrueType and Type1 files without amazing features
> and huge character set, but it's really okay. Later versions (>= v13
> and the Corel X suites, I think) also ship with an OpenType
> collection, but I did not get my hands on these so far.

If you use your Google-fu, you'll find a wealth of discussion whether or 
not the CorelDRAW should be avoided by professional typesetters seems, 
but to me it looks like a merely moral issue: some of them are shameless 
copys of other fonts (mostly quite expensive ones owned by Linotype), 
made by Bitstream in the last millenium. But the copyists are experts, 
and the general quality is high, also w.r.t. ligatures and kerning, at 
least as far as I can tell. That's also what I read between the lines of 
some people involved more deeply in typesetting than I am.
However, you won't find a huge number of glyphs outside the Western 
language range, headline or real small caps variants, or "advanced" 
features like old-style figures or glyph variants (though this might 
have changed in the OpenType versions). It'll be fine for almost all 
lyrics and most markups you achieve within Lilypond, that's for sure.

I do not approve of the copying practice, but on the other hand type 
design looks like an endless history of shameless plugs, and fortunately 
I'm not the one to judge this at the end of the day. At least you won't 
run into legal problems. And I found my old CorelDRAW version years ago 
for as little as 10 Euro plus shipping.

BTW, CorelDRAW rocks for amateurs IMHO, if you don't suffer from a 
severe featuritis. Too sad it was never really usable on anything but 
Windows, but I still use my old v.11 every now and then. While the 
functionality is no longer state of the art, the usability is great.

And another BTW, the mail archive proves that I indeed had a look at 
Gillius and Tribun before.


Best,
Alexander