Re: Added RFN-violation bug template to wiki

On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 11:31 AM, Dave Crossland <dave@lab6.com> wrote:

On Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:20 AM Nathan Willis <nwillis@glyphography.com> wrote:

I would agree with Dave that there are perfectly valid uses for RFNs — a prime example being the SIL fonts, which claim an RFN on the "SIL" portion of the font name, not on the entirety. Unscientific surveying suggests that many type designers aren't aware that you can even use RFNs in a piecemeal fashion like that;

As you can read on the current firacode issue I just mentioned, in fact rfns are required in whole or in part, and so not only it's the sil word reserved but also gentium etc

Well, Gentium might not be the right example, if they do claim RFN on the whole thing, but they have other fonts where they just reserve "SIL" (this came up when I was doing my FOSDEM talk) and not the font-name portion. I don't have the list in front of me, though.

Anyway, the point I was getting at is still that you can claim the RFN on just part of the user-visible font name, it doesn't have to be the entire thing, and it seems like a lot of people don't realize it's that flexible. So you can do "MyFoundry Baskerville" and just reserve your foundry name (which you'd likely have a trademark claim on that you're defending in other ways, too). Then "OtherType Baskerville" is explicitly still OK.

Or possibly "Superfont Pro" and just RFN the "Pro", so other derivatives couldn't use that suffix ... although I haven't really thought long and hard about the implications of that....

Nate

nathan.p.willis
nwillis@glyphography.com