laser-lovers@uw-beaver (04/09/85)
From: William LeFebvre <phil@rice.ARPA> > As was made clear in the old *Find-a-Font* catelog [sic], none of > those fonts can reasonably be regarded as being in the public domain. > While most of them are not beautiful, they are nearly all stolen. However... To my, admittedly, untrained eye, it looks like the Berkeley default troff fonts, R, I, B, and parts of S, are raster copies of parts of the Hershey repertory. Perhaps they are second, third, etc. generations, but it does look like the original source was the Hershey repertory. Would that make them public domain? However... If they are taken from the Hershey repertory, they are bad renderings of a mediocre font. One would do better to re-rasterize them himself/herself. Speaking of which: I have a program that generates fonts from the Hershey repertory (or any file with the same format). I originally wrote it to generate a specific format font file for local hackery, but I can easily rewrite the relevant portions to generate vfont files if there is enough interest. It uses a symmetric DDA to draw the lines, and pen shapes and sizes are specifiable at run time. Send mail to me directly if you are interested. Be forewarned: it may take me awhile to get it to the point where I would feel comfortable about giving it to people ... like, a few weeks. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.arpa>
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (04/13/85)
From: ihnp4!utzoo!henry@uw-beaver.arpa > However... > To my, admittedly, untrained eye, it looks like the Berkeley default > troff fonts, R, I, B, and parts of S, are raster copies of parts of > the Hershey repertory. Perhaps they are second, third, etc. > generations, but it does look like the original source was the Hershey > repertory. Would that make them public domain? The Berkeley default troff fonts, at least the 200/inch instantiations, are bit-tuned versions of the Hershey fonts. The Hershey->raster conversion was originally done by Bill Reeves at U of Toronto (whence the "Berkeley" typesetting-on-Versatec software came), and bit-tuning occurred both at U of T (early on) and UCB (later). How "public domain" the result is, is a good question. Both U of T and UCB impose limits on redistribution of distributed software and databases. (As to how the U of T stuff made it into x.yBSD without U of T permission: it went by an indirect route and the ownership notices got lost along the way.) It depends on whether the bit-tuning is major enough to constitute a claim of ownership. Actually, I doubt that either university cares very much. > If they are taken from the Hershey repertory, they are bad renderings > of a mediocre font. One would do better to re-rasterize them > himself/herself. The Hershey fonts aren't terrific, since they were never meant for raster use at all. And Bill's rasterizing code was pretty straightforward, as I recall, and could probably be improved by suitable injections of subtlety. But it was all we had... Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry