Re: fonts and patents
On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> .) Arphic Inc, a Taiwanese font company, has released four Chinese
> TrueType fonts, two covering the GB character set, and the other
> two having Big 5 character set. The licence (which you can find
> attached, justified to fit the screen better) is a slightly
> modified GPL which fits better to fonts.
>
> The home site is
>
> ftp://cle.linux.org.tw/pub/fonts/arphic/
> ftp://linux.tp.edu.tw/pub/arphic/
>
> but I think it would be better that these fonts are copied to
> ftp.gnu.org so that all servers around the world mirror them. All
> in all, this is about 30MByte of data -- the connection to Taiwan
> (at least from Europe) is extremely bad, and since ftp.gnu.org can
> be found frequently on CD-ROMs coming with Linux distributions,
> most users don't have to download it (and many users don't have
> internet at all).
Yes, indeed, and Kudos to Arphic and also to CLE, the Chinese Linux
Extension Team in Taiwan for taking the initiative for negotiating with
Arphic. These Chinese fonts are now incorporated into CLE (for Red Hat,
SuSE etc.) and will be part of Debian 2.2 as soon as I finish my final
exams. <grin>
These Chinese Big5 and GB TrueType fonts work great with FreeType-1.3.1
and X-TT-1.3.0.x, and works well with CJK (LaTeX) too. I think we would
need an expanded UBig5.sfd (or something between UBig5.sfd and
UBg5plus.sfd?) though to include the extra characters in the Big5 fonts.
I thought these fonts do use hinting, don't they? They look better with
hinting turned on, but usable with them off at 16pt or 24pt? Something
like that. :-)
Cheers,
Anthony
--
Anthony Fok Tung-Ling Civil and Environmental Engineering
foka@ualberta.ca, foka@debian.org University of Alberta, Canada
anthony_fok@catholic.org Keep smiling! *^_^*
Come visit Our Lady of Victory Camp -- http://come.to/olvc
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