On Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 4:05 PM Timothy Gaskell <[email protected]> wrote:
> The reserved-name restriction is on the metadata of the sources Google > Fonts derived from the TTF, but when Iooked at an old version of the Google > Fonts API website, it just hyperlinked the to the OFL itself. I think a > likely scenario is simply that that the site/project structure resulted in > folks loosing track of the reserved name requirement over time. > Okay, I'm not sure I understand what file you're referring to by "the metadata of the sources Google Fonts derived from the TTF" here; maybe it'd be fastest to just be totally explicit about the files being discussed. To summarize what I see in the various sites: Location: https://github.com/googlefonts/CardoFont/blob/main/ ** this is what the GF build system uses as its upstream - OFL.txt -> does not assert RFNs - old/version-1.000/Cardo-Regular-TTF.SFD: version -> does not assert RFNs - old/version-1.000/Cardo-Italic.otf: version 001.001 -> does not assert RFNs - old/version-1.000/Cardo-Bold-TTF.SFD: version 1.0011 -> does not assert RFNs - old/version-1.000/Cardo-Italic-TTF.SFD: version 0.991 -> does not assert RFNs - old/version-1.000/Manual104s.pdf -> asserts RFN on "Cardo" - refers to the font package as 1.04; that seems to mean the entire bundle - sources/Cardo.glyphs -> does not assert RFNs - sources/Cardo-Italic.glyphs -> does not assert RFNs Location: https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/cardo/ ** this is what the GF build system uses in CI/CD - METADATA.pb -> does not assert RFNs - OFL.txt -> does not assert RFNs - upstream_info.md -> does not assert RFNs - also claims that the .ttf files were not built by the GF CI/CD system and were provided by David Perry - worth noting that this "upstream info" file itself is autogenerated and seems to come from some AI tool - Cardo-Regular.ttf: version 1.0451 -> does not assert RFNs - Cardo-Bold.ttf: version 1.0011 -> does not assert RFNs - Cardo-Italic.ttf: version 0.991 -> does not assert RFNs Location: https://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html ** this is the designer's site - site itself: asserts RFN on "Cardo" - archive file download: https://scholarsfonts.net/cardo104.zip - Cardo104s.ttf: version 1.045 -> asserts RFN on "Cardo" - Cardob101.ttf: version 1.001 2005 -> asserts RFN on "Cardo" - Cardoi99.ttf: version 0.99 -> asserts RFN on "Cardo" - Manual104s.pdf -> asserts RFN on "Cardo" There are also trademark claims for "Cardo" in the name tables and "all rights reserved" copyright statements in some places, in every location. > If you look at the author's website, he writes favourably about getting > selected by Google Fonts but later complains about websites that remove > less-frequently-used characters from his font in violation of the Reserved > Name claus. From a quick look at Google's FontForge source files, I don't > think they were a culprit on that front in 2010. > So the only place I have found the RFN assertion in the GF repository is in the PDF. Based on the thread, I was expecting to see it in other places, but unless it's somewhere I didn't find it, it seems like it's just that manual. I think that it's plausible that the PDF was not rebuilt just for its inclusion in the repository and was simply the same one from the designer's site. The fact that all of the font files in the GF repositories have their version numbers incremented by a "1" suffix (as you noted) and the fact that all of those files have the RFN assertion removed supports, in my view, that the designer built a separate set of files to send to GF with the only change being the RFN removal. (Amusingly, the "1" is a different precision level on the Italic....) For instance, there are OTL features in the font files that the GF service does not support, so those were not stripped out at the same time. That was the standard practice, and I think the sum total of the fields in the fonts supports that as the most plausible conclusion. GF has been opposed to including RFN-laden fonts going all the way back, because the clause triggers renames on subsetting (not just rebuilding-from-scratch). And subsetting gets does whenever the files are requested by a page in CSS. > If anyone knows who the first hand to touch the font for Google Fonts was, > it would be great to ask whether those initial 2010 changes (version > increment of .001 likely corresponding to optimizations for web and file > size without removing characters) were done in coordination with the author. > I sent an informal message about this and was told by in-the-know folk that the "font file" should be regarded as authoritative. Although I didn't specifically ask about the PDF manual, since I hadn't looked at that yet at that point. It'd certainly be possible to open an issue on GitHub and ask; someone who could either speak firsthand about the intake of the font or who has a record of the email exchange could then post something in a public location that would clear up mysteries about what happened back then. Or maybe there's some other way to get in touch with the designer. In any case, it doesn't seem like there are other differences between the available files. Nate -- nathan.p.willis [email protected] <http://identi.ca/n8>
