Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!esquire!baumgart
From: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Worry: Using Exotic Fonts
Message-ID: <1799@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 23 Feb 90 17:41:27 GMT
References: <99500020@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <1990Feb21.174332.17973@intercon.com>
Sender: news@esquire.UUCP
Reply-To: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten)
Organization: Davis Polk & Wardwell
Lines: 35
In-reply-to: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)

In article <1990Feb21.174332.17973@intercon.com>, amanda@mermaid (Amanda Walker) writes:
>As I read Adobe's font license, I can't distribute an electronic document that
>contains our logo (and thus that font), even if I hack the font so that the
>only letters in it are the ones in the word "InterCon" (which, in fact, I have
>done--it brings the EPSF file down to about 5K from 37.5K).

One possibility would be to convert the font into an editable outline
that could then be further modified in something like Illustrator.  I
know there's at least one package that does this on the Mac; whether
it works with Adobe's Type 1 fonts is another question.  Of course,
since Adobe is going to publish the specs for them any day now, I
assume it will work with them in the future if it doesn't already.

Then your logo would just be an EPS image -- no worries about
distributing copyrighted fonts.

Of course, this doesn't help at all if your whole document is
formatted with an "uncommon" font.

>From a conventional typsetting perspective, Adobe's terms make plenty of
>sense, but as documents start being distributed more and more in electronic
>form, they start getting in the way of a lot of uses for PostScript.

Agreed.  Maybe if Adobe's PS interpreters did a better job of font
substitution (after all, Courier is almost always the wrong choice) it
would be less of a problem -- documents would be at least readable, if
not perfect.  But it's a thorny issue, and one that clearly prevents
PostScript from being the document interchange format that Adobe seems
to want it to be.

--
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   baumgart@esquire.dpw.com     | 
   cmcl2!esquire!baumgart       |                           - David Letterman