Fonts (was: Re: OFF: Free Software)

* Paul.Bennett@xncorp.com (Paul.Bennett@xncorp.com) [991001 18:19]:
> John Cowan writes:
> >>>>>>
> The problem is that typography isn't free, and nobody's volunteering
> to make such fonts available free, except Michael Everson, and he only
> when he's not busy, which is rarely.  See http://www.indigo.ie/egt .
>
> The fonts used to print the Unicode books are donated by various typographical
> companies and usable solely for that purpose.
> <<<<<<
>
> *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,
You cannot copyright, or otherwise protect the look-n-feel of a font,
only the -name-. Which is why you have similar looking fonts with
almost-similar sounding names... Arnold Boecklin vs. Arabia etc. The
source doesn't matter.

When Corel needed ttf-fonts for Corel Draw, what they basically did was
-print out- the full charsets of the fonts, scan in the prints, and then
redraw the fonts with the help of the scans... compare the names and
looks of the fonts coming with CD with the fonts depicted in the Adobe
books for instance...


tal.
--
"Better living through conlanging"