tp@mccall.com (Terry Poot) (11/30/90)
In article <3137@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>, naughton@wind.Eng.Sun.COM (Patrick Naughton) writes: >To be eligible for a license you must fit one of these four categories: > > o) SPARC archictecture hardware vendor. > o) SVR4 licensee. > o) non-unix platform developer (Amiga, MacOS, etc). > o) NeWS lisceneee prior to Oct, 1987. So much for end users of other systems, right? >f3 font's are for display only. Using xnews to drive printers (a la >NeWSprint) is not covered under this license agreement. Royalty >agreements may be arranged on a contractual basis with Sun. Well, my non-disclosure agreement prevents me from disclosing the terms of such an agreement, but this statement is no less misleading than the original "free software" announcement _IF_ you are not an OEM (I'm an end user). (To Sun's credit, they've never claimed otherwise.) Notice that he says "royalty agreement". >Hope this clears some things up. Yep. It means that my initial excitement at reading the press release was totally unfounded. I can't buy this thing, and even if I could, I can't legally do what I wanted to do with it. Why weren't any of these restrictions in the original announcement? HELP! Maybe someone out there can help me. I know this is only peripherally related to X, but the audience here seems highly knowlegeable about fonts. Here is my problem: I have an application (strictly in-house, no redistribution whatsoever) that plots on a Versatec electrostatic plotter. I need to write text on the plot. I have to be able to scale and rotate the text arbitrarily. (I could quantize to specific font sizes, but the rotation is a must). Therefore, I need to render outlines. The Versatec doesn't speak Postscript. I've talked to various vendors of such software, but all want to sell to OEM's, meaning the prices are out of this world from an end user perspective. I also need Cyrillic and Kanji, which limits my choice of vendors considerably. My application runs on VMS, but I'm quite willing to port software. I'd like something that uses an open font format, so I can get fonts if/when I need them. The X tie in is that I do need to be able to display this stuff on the screen as well. I had hoped to be able to use TypeScaler for this, but I can't get it, and if I could, I'm not allowed to print it. Aside: The plotter is 400dpi, so I'm not absolutely certain I need any of this expensive stuff. With a description of the font format, I could write a simple scan converter. If anyone already has such a thing, I'd like to experiment with it. I realize I'd still need to buy fonts, and that the screen representation will be poor. Howewever the screen presentation doesn't _have_ to be real good, since it is essentially a preview, and in this application, checking the positioning is more important than being able to read the text. The can always do a zoom if they have to read it. (Of course, I'd _like_ the screen representation to look nice if I could). Yes, I'm really as confused as I sound. Any help would be greatly appreciated. The only response I got on comp.fonts was basically "tough luck". I can't believe I'm the only person that's ever needed to do this, but everyone keeps telling me I am, and it takes a lot of talking to explain what I want to the various font companies. -- Terry Poot <tp@mccall.com> The McCall Pattern Company (uucp: ...!rutgers!ksuvax1!mccall!tp) 615 McCall Road (800)255-2762, in KS (913)776-4041 Manhattan, KS 66502, USA