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A lack of fonts? No. A lack of high-quality, relatively-complete, free fonts? Absolutely. Free fonts usually come in one width, two weights (regular and bold) and two styles (roman and italic), for a total of four variations, and usually cover the Latin alphabet plus a few relatively-common variants (accented characters for western European languages, and maybe a couple of additional characters like the the German eszett or the Icelandic eth). Professional fonts will often come with perhaps five weights (light through black), three widths (condensed, normal, wide), and two styles, for a total of thirty variants. Some will also come in different optical sizes, or have other variable properties. Additionally, they'll have much larger character coverage (perhaps including Cyrillic or Greek), and have multiple stylistic variations of individual characters (stylistic alternates, swashes, old-style figures, etc.), as well as ligatures of commonly-colliding pairs of characters like "fi." Professional fonts can thus have literally thousands of times more glyphs, are very labor-intensive to produce, and are fairly expensive. This font is certainly less rich than most of Adobe's "Pro" line of fonts, but still looks much better than a lot of what's out there in terms of open source type. |
For example, the most popular sans on GWF is currently Open Sans, which does come in a wider range of weights and has italic and condensed versions available. Unlike this new font family from Adobe, Open Sans also renders well on Windows, including Windows XP and including all major browsers when used as a web font.