Freetype2

Duane Maxwell dmaxwell at exobox.com
Wed Sep 6 17:33:44 UTC 2000


Andreas Raab writes:
>Not if you can legally embed the bitmap-ed versions in Squeak. E.g.,
>assuming that we tap into the OS renderer and pass the bitmaps representing
>certain glyphs at certain sizes up to Squeak where they are logically
>organized in a StrikeFont you could ship the strike font. The big question
>is if that's legal or not. As far as I understand, the general consent in
>the game community seems to be that this is fine (you are not shipping the
>original work nor anything from which the original work can be re-engineered
>nor even the 'apparatus' which was used to create the derived work, e.g., a
>specific font renderer).

I did some cursory research on this since it comes up frequently and this
seems to be what's going on there.

In the game community, the issue of embedding fonts is somewhat different
than in our situation.  In a game, the use of a font is very secondary - to
create display graphics, such as scores, backstory screens, and so on, but
typically they are virtually never used as _fonts_ per se directly
manipulated by a user.  The only exception is when you're entering player
names, etc.  In other words, the use of a font in a game does not generally
conflict with the "normal" use of a font, and the vendor tends to be OK
with that, though any professional game company still obtains permission.
In one product I was involved with, the need to get permission hinged on
whether or not any text was printable at any time - in games, that's
typically never.

In Squeak's case, however, we are using them in a manner consistent with
their original purpose - to provide glyphs for arbitrary text.  We gives
users the ability to choose them, (de)install them, print them, and
otherwise manipulate them as _fonts_.

-- Duane






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