(currently in CVS)
(proposal)
Bitstream and the Gnome project released a whole font family (sans, serif and mono with slant/weight combinations) with a very cool license. It allows all redistribution of derived work provided we don't use the words Bitstream and Vera, and keep the original copyright license terms. Easy.
The Vera font is more vertically stretched than Courier but has a smaller height spacing. That's why I'm using 14 pixels for Vera and 15 pixels for Courier, to make a fair visual comparison.
Anti-aliasing : since we don't do gamma-corrected blending, the anti-aliasing looks different with different contrasts. This is more visible with Vera since it has a lesser weight and has less fully covered pixels than Courier. The less impaired case should be black text for both fonts.
Hinting : Vera is legible from 8 pixels, and really neat from 13. Courier is legible from 10 pixels, and really neat from 15. Vera is better hinted, but rely on the patented TrueType bytecode interpreter. This is not (yet) an issue in Europe, however I tried the FreeType autohinter which actually renders pretty good results (with both Courier and Vera). Thus patent-ill countries can still benefit from the quality of the fonts.
| Bitstream Courier (currently in CVS) |
Bitstream Vera Mono (proposal) |
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For windozians, font size in dots is pixel * .75 (pixel * 72 / dpi, where dpi=96 as a default).