Google Web Fonts about meslo-font

[andreberg]

Opps, just realized I never replied.

Fact of the matter is I looked at your proposal and what kinda made me shy away from it was the "Yes! I own all rights to this font *" checkbox required to fill out the form.

As you may know, I do not own the rights to this font since I just modified it from an Apple font, who initially modified it from a Bitstream Vera OpenSource font.
So I am not too sure if I would be able to do that.

I do agree with your general sentiment though: the world can never have enough good monospaced fonts.

[okonomiyaki3000]

Hmm. That's too bad. But is it really OK to distribute the font here? I guess I don't really understand much about copyright, copyleft and other related matters.

[andreberg]

Well, as mentioned, Apple's Menlo and thus this font are based on a well known open source font called Bitstream Vera Mono and the changes that Apple made are really tiny (they changed the metrics and a couple glyphs like the asterisk). That's why I think it should be fine.

EDIT: I should elaborate that I mean the glyph changes Apple did were tiny. I don't know about any TT hinting changes but that would be interesting if they did anything there for the whole font considering TT hinting on Apple's Quartz rasterizer pretty much ignores TT hints in favor of difsplaying them better with the rasterizer's unique system.

Unfortunately, that still doesn't change the fact that I don't own the original sources (frankly, Apple doesn't too as far as I know unless they struck some kinda deal with Bitstream - very likely that they licensed it and made the changes themselves since they want to distribute it with the OS as default).

If you need a very similar font down to 99% of glyph equivalence which is hosted online, look into Bitstream Vera Mono.
It should be available via Google Web Fonts and should give you what you need.

Of course you won't have the line gap variants (which was the point of Meslo LG in the first place) but for web browsers those OS/2 metrics that produce different line gaps won't be honored anyway because of all the CSS styling going on so you might as well use the original font.