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From: jnh@ecemwl.ncsu.edu (Joseph N. Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Adobe Type Manager
Message-ID: <4055@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 27 Sep 89 19:20:27 GMT
References: <15514@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <1179@adobe.UUCP> <5516@wiley.UUCP> <2463@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <125093@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>  <1236@adobe.UUCP> <20062@usc.edu> <13818@well.UUCP> <14699@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
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Reply-To: jnh@ecemwl.UUCP (Joseph N. Hall)
Organization: North Carolina State University
Lines: 34

In article <14699@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> captkidd@athena.mit.edu (Ivan Cavero Belaunde) writes:
>...  Can you see it?  Go to the bookstore, drop $30 on this
>book, scan the pages in, and in a couple of days, you can have a *huge*
>type library.  I don't foresee any legal problems either, since this
>seems to be "fair use" of the material - after all, the end result is a
>printed document with those fonts, and graphic artists have been doing
>that for years already.

Yes, this is certainly legal, since the printed representation of a typeface
cannot be copyrighted.  What you suggest in your article, though, isn't
really practical for professional applications, unless your "batch mode"
font scanner is smart enough to produce a decent set of kerning pairs ...
this requires AI that is still under development and which is closely
guarded where it exists in industry.

I would think that maybe if you had a 400 or 600 dpi scanner and a large
sample of text to work from (say, a book), you could write software that
would autotrace, smooth, etc., and deduce kerning pairs (ligatures would
be another pain), but then it would have to be an accurate OCR, too, unless
you wanted to type the text in yourself ...

I am a little dismayed at the high unit pricing of fonts from the professional
suppliers, but have hope that it will come down and that the individual users
won't be so thoroughly screwed as they have been the past few years.  I would
think that a font library of, say, 25-50 faces (with a reasonable set of
stylistic variations and several hundred kerning pairs apiece) shouldn't
cost more than an application like Word or Illustrator.   Or maybe some
university will get into the act and produce a set of good public-domain
fonts for the masses ...

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