Re: OFF: Free Software

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Paul Bennett wrote:

>
> *I* just volunteered to produce fonts for free (as have others in this list),
> with the one caveat (in my case) that *as yet* my ability isn't very good, so
> the results may be a bit shabby, and take a rather long time to produce.  The
> one problem is getting copyright-free source material, and if I could draw
> freehand or find a source in the public domain, I'd churn out one free font a
> month, at least.
>
There are quite a few good sources, for someone with a scanner. One is
Lepsius, who did a book on scripts. I think I mentioned it on my website -
it has quite complete plates of, say, Bugis-Makassar. That's one I used
to make my Bugis font. Another source are the typographic example books
published by Brill of Leyden, in the beginning of this century. Brill had
the absolute larges collection of leaden founts, until they went modern
in the eighties, and sold the original stamps for ear-rings. It's a pity,
I used to know someone who had a few of those example books, but we don't
meet anymore, but perhaps the University library has some. I think you
can also make scans of the scripts in Daniels and use them as a base
for fonts without fear of copyright issues. That's where my meroitic
font comes from.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt