On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 04:46:20AM +0200, Andreas L. Delmelle wrote: > > Sure! Happens all the time... Concerning Chris' question about the legal > issues, that's a whole different story (--the details of which I'm not too > familiar with) > I been doing a lot of googling. It turns out that you can't copyright a font. The US gov't is too afraid that such a copyright would lead to someone copyrighting the alphabet itself. What you can copyright is anything that creates a font, which in this case is a Bookman.pfm or Bookman.pfb file.
However, I could open up some high quality software, scan in the shape of all the Bookman fonts, twiddle with the shapes until they are exactly right, and realease my fonts with no copyright restrictions. It turns out that doing this is pretty difficult. Still, it is a worthwhile endeavor for someone who is skilled at creating fonts to create knockoffs of the high-quality fonts and realese them under GNU. After all, many of the really nice fonts, such as Garamond, were invented by people 500 years ago, so why should Adobe get copyright fees? (See http://slashdot.org/articles/02/08/18/1519217.shtml?tid=109 for a fruther discussion.) MS itself has realeased the standard web fonts under a pretty non-restrictive (though by no means open source) liscence. You can download these fonts from http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ I don't know if the same non-restrictive MS lisence also applies to fonts beyond these web fonts. I also discovered a webpage that has all the truetype versions of virtually every professional font out there (I'm talking about fonts for laying out a publication, not decorative fonts): http://www.clipserver.de/Fonts/C.htm However, though you can download the fonts without paying, copyright restrictions probably apply. So I can use these fonts with FOP for publishing a thesis, but not for any real commercial work. And of course, these fonts are true-type rather than PS. None-the-less, FOP seems to produce nice output with true-type fonts. It is unfortunate that Knuth's fonts aren't usable for FOP. Paul -- ************************ *Paul Tremblay * [EMAIL PROTECTED] ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
