Re: Truetype fonts from XFree86 4.2?

On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 10:47:31 -0700 (PDT)
Jim.Gettys_at_hp.com wrote:
> Nils,
Hello Jim (and others too of course!)

> The Luxi fonts are freely redistributable, so long as they are not
> modified; the fonts are from Chuck Bigelow; the license itself is in
> the X distribution at xc/fonts/scaled/TTF/COPYRIGHT.BH.

Thanks for clarification!
OK then, what about packaging them up for Familiar?
I would do it...

> The issue with them is that they are not well hinted, and therefore
> won't image nicely at low resolution. Getting fonts hinted for screen
> usage costs about $10 U.S. per glyph; needless to say, this gets
> expensive, quickly; the Luxi fonts were converted to ttf but not
> manually hinted, and therefore won't do very well at the resolutions
> we use.

One remark on question:

- given the $10 per glyph a whole font wouldn't be THAT expensive... we
would need less than 256 glyphs per font which makes << $2k5. Given the
enomous benefit this sounds reasonable. In all we would need about four
basic fonts which makes roughly $10k. A lot for a human but not so much
for bigger companies (hint hint :)

- What does "so long as they are not modified" mean more specifically?
Does it also mean that we would not be allowed to manually hint them if
we wanted? Else we could try to do so ourselves using pfaedit; a really
excellent font tool!

> I also checked with our lawyer here, and given that we do not charge
> for familiar/gpe, he says we're on sound footing to continue to
> redistribute the Microsoft screen fonts, as the Microsoft license
> permits redistribution in that case.

OK, well, that's a nice workaround for now but I don't like this
solution very much:

1. We are still dependant on M$
2. The installation procedure of a Linux iPaq has to unpack the M$
package, i.e. we cannot repackage them as ipkg 3. Value added resellers
cannot fully install an iPaq with Linux since they would "redistribute"
the fonts for money.

This way we'll never make a product out of it...

> I'm trying to wrap up a deal right now for another set of well hinted
> fonts that won't have any strings attached. When I can say more, I
> will; I hope this will be sometime in the next month or so.

Huray!
That would be great, let's hope for the best!

> - Jim
Thanks!
CU
  nils faerber

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