Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!amdcad!decwrl!karlton
From: karlton@decwrl.dec.com (Philip Karlton)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Universal font standard
Message-ID: <356@bacchus.DEC.COM>
Date: 7 Apr 88 01:50:40 GMT
References: <3178@gryphon.CTS.COM> <4403@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: karlton@wsl.dec.com (Philip Karlton)
Organization: DEC Western Software Lab, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 31
Keywords: common

In article <4403@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> samalone@athena.mit.edu (Stuart A. Malone) writes:
...
>I have a copy of the CBDF specs (version 2.1) in postscript format.  (It
>includes explanatory pictures, so it's hard to distribute in human-readable
>ASCII form.)  However, the document is copyrighted by Adobe, so I don't think
>I'm free to distribute it without their permission.  (Would anyone from Adobe
>care to grant permission?)

The actual copyright note now reads

	Copyright (C) 1984, 1987,Adobe Systems, Inc.

	Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this
	software and its documentation for any purpose and without
	fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright
	notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright
	notice and this permission notice appear in supporting
	doucmentation.

Adobe does not actually support the BDF format. They distribute their bitmap
fonts in 2.0 (usually called Adobe Screen Format). ASF files, to a certain
extent, cannot stand alone. They depend upon the AFM files to hold the bulk of
the font metrics and other interesting things found in font dictionaires.

The BDF format was developed with Adobe's permission explicitly to support the
needs of the X Window System: to have a single file hold all of the relevant
information about a single set of bitmap glyphs. The BDF format is not much of
extension of the AFM format.

Feel free to post a copy of the BDF specification.

PK