And yes, I meant for anything greek web. I’m sorry. :)

Your mention of the possibility for Hellenic characters for Inconsolata is thrilling (that’s not an exaggeration), not just because it is a beautiful font, but also because there is considerable lack of free Hellenic fonts.

Hellenic has been scarcely supported by most European and U.S. font designers and it was only Microsoft’s efforts in the early to mid 1990s with Windows that provided a few free, relatively good fonts with Hellenic glyphs for most people. For this reason, and because the market for Hellenic fonts is relatively small, the very few font design houses in Hellas, charge huge premiums for the ‘extended’ versions of latin fonts, making them prohibitively expensive for the casual user.

So, albeit limited by population, there is interest and I am sure many people dealing with Hellenic on a daily basis would appreciate your efforts should you decide to extend Inconsolata with Hellenic glyphs.

Regarding the technical aspects of the font, I think CFF should not be a problem on Windows XP or later. Hinting, however, is. I dislike technologies that compromise font æsthetics under the excuse of readability (or any excuse for that matter). Those two should go together. Cleartype was built ignoring æsthetics and focusing on readability. Although I hear that it has improved under Vista, I truly believe the premise is wrong. I don’t use Windows so I cannot really tell how good or bad Inconsolata looks under different antialiasing settings. I have used it under OS X (Subpixel) and Freetype (Subpixel, hinting off) and it looks very readable and beautiful to me. I suspect, however, many people on Windows will not agree. Well, at least they’ll have Consolas :)

Thanks for the testing under OSX and various Linux configurations. My guess about the main reason it doesn’t look so good under ClearType is that the outlines are specified in CFF format, rather than TrueType, and I’d imagine Microsoft’s rasterizer has been much, much more carefully tuned for the latter. Of course, to make it look really good on screen would require intensive TrueType hint programming, which I’m reluctant to do for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that the TrueType hint language is patented.

Doing Hellenic characters is not out of the question at all. Mostly, I just need to know there is interest. Since it’s OFL licensed, another possibility is that others pitch in and extend the language range. This has already happened for a number of other fonts released under free license.

Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model, by means of software programs.

From Wikipedia.

Most typically it is used with reference to programs that generate 3D graphics from 3D models. In this case I was referring to the program, in the respective Operating Systems mentioned, that takes care of displaying fonts on the screen, by employing some algorithm to improve on their appearance or readability, e.g. Subpixel rendering. ‘Font rasteriser‘ would have been the (technically) accurate term.

But then again, that’s Cleartype’s fault not the font’s. Microsoft has stated in the past (see Channel 9) that Cleartype compromises æsthetics for ‘readability’. I think it compromises everything for nothing and I’d choose OS X’s renderer (by far the best I’ve seen on any platform) or even freetype over it anyday. :)

The first thing I thought when I saw Inconsolata was that it looked like a taller version of Consolas, perhaps of the same height as IBM’s Letter Gothic (an amazing, yet quite rare font). Looking at it for longer made some of the other sources of inspiration obvious.

But you are right, the absence of greek support is a no-no for anything web.

You mean no-no for web development in Hellas. Indeed, I agree with you.

The other interesting aspect of it is that it looks amazing both under OS X’s subpixel renderer, under Freetype on linux and other *nices, and — I guess — under Cleartype on Windows (although I have no Windows machines to test this). This is in stark contrast to Consolas, which is a font created specifically for Cleartype and does not look as nice on non-Cleartype renderers.

But you are right, the absence of greek support is a no-no for anything web. A pity :(