51–60 of 139 posts
The quote marks on that page are a real mess. Best practice is to use double curly quotes or single curly quotes—not backtick and apostrophe. See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html ("Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote').") Also, Founder's Caslon is commercially…
This font's ragged looking nature — is it primarily because of the way the font was printed at the time? I would assume there is some loss of clarity and other artefacts introduced by how metal type printing prints. It seems like these fonts were created only by looking at printed works. Could the original metal blocks (sorts/matrixes/punches) still be around?
I'm usually a fan of Windows-style font rendering that snaps on-screen text to the pixel grid. But for this typeface it seems to heavily exaggerate the roughness as the different serifs snap all over. The pictures of the print pages look much nicer. How does it look on a Mac monitor?
How does it look on windows?
Reading this really helps illustrate why and how a font is considered a computer program and thus eligible for copyright protection. I don’t think most laypeople (and even many programmers) intuitively think of it that way because they seem like a collection of little pictures, but so much work goes into these fonts. We are fortunate to have so many good ones to choose from today, and that someone has footed the bill…
Copyright protects all creative works, with very few exceptions. Whether or not a font is a computer program has absolutely nothing to do with whether it is eligible for copyright protection.
Even if the font was just "a collection of little pictures" (that is, a bitmap font), it would still fall under copyright protection, unless the pictures were all in the public domain already, or some other special circumstances apply (e.g. creative threshold not met, created by the government, etc.).
But for the eligibility, I find old typesets like these Fell fonts harder to read.
What I wish for is rather than encoding the wavy imperfections in the font, they should be procedurally generated at rasterization time. This way, the graininess can stay at the same resolution regardless of the font-size. As it is now, if you have a 120pt font, the rough edges are magnified. Is there a way to specify something like that in the font language? Or does the rasterization engine have to implement that?
Anything procedurally generated is antithetical to professional font design. Fonts at different sizes are carefully fine-tuned exactly for the reasons that you mentioned, i.e., small features at larger sizes start looking wrong.
Reading this really helps illustrate why and how a font is considered a computer program and thus eligible for copyright protection. I don’t think most laypeople (and even many programmers) intuitively think of it that way because they seem like a collection of little pictures, but so much work goes into these fonts. We are fortunate to have so many good ones to choose from today, and that someone has footed the bill…
> Reading this really helps illustrate why and how a font is considered a computer program and thus eligible for copyright protection. Copyright protects all creative works, with very few exceptions. Whether or not a font is a computer program has absolutely nothing to do with whether it is eligible for copyright protection. Even if the font was just "a collection of little pictures" (that is, a bitmap font), it woul…
The digital workaround is to have bytecode in font files that is copyrightable.
Ah, I've found my new terminal font: https://building-m.net/xbackbone/jOGE6/sUGEqePe74/raw.png
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reading this really helps illustrate why and how a font is considered a computer program and thus eligible for copyright protection. Copyright protects all creative works, with very few exceptions. Whether or not a font is a computer program has absolutely nothing to do with whether it is eligible for copyright protection. Even if the font was just "a collection of little pictures" (that is, a bitmap font), it woul…
Under US law, typefaces aren't copyrightable, and even in other copyright regimes, they only get a shorter protection duration. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... for an overview. The digital workaround is to have bytecode in font files that is copyrightable.
Does that mean that if you take a commercial font file and strip the bytecode, retaining only the glyph shapes, you can do as you wish with the result? And does that mean all bitmap fonts are actually public domain in the US?
