It's been mentioned several times in the past that one necessary thing OGA lacks is a decent selection of fonts.  In fact, I would venture to say that in general it's been very difficult to find good, free fonts out on the internet.  Of course, there are a lot of sites out there with tons of "free" fonts, but when you look closely at them, you'll discover that the random and arbitrary licensing restrictions on most of said fonts prevent you from using them for any sort of serious work, either Open Source or commercial.

So what's a FOSS developer to do?  Well, until recently, the only options were to (a) rely on certain standard font families that come preinstalled on most machines, (b) package some of the few existing fonts (such as the Liberation fonts) that are known to be safely licensed, or (c) roll your own, which is a ton of work.

Enter the Open Font Library.  As of the time of this post, the Open Font Library hosts 170 different fonts (and growing), all licensed in such a way (either Public Domain or the Debian-approved SIL Open Font License) that they're completely safe to use in any Open Source or proprietary software, commercial or otherwise.

But don't take my word for it.  Go check the site out for yourself, and if you're feeling up to it, contribute a font of your own!

Bart

Just wanted to put out a quick reminder about the Sci-Fi props contest we're running.  We're giving away Amazon gift cards and Google Wave invites (if you don't already have one).  You can read more about the contest here.  The contest ends on the 28th of December, so now is a great time to get started! :)

Bart