I've been contemplating whether or not this is useful and/or necessary, but I'm thinking that I ought to register a 4-char ID my foundry with Microsoft so it appears on their vendor list. Any thoughts on the matter? Is there any point in doing that?
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@Thomas Phinney”, that’s exactly why I thought to ask the question. I was wondering what purpose, legal or otherwise, it really has.
@Hrant H. Papazian, it makes you very special The one I would prefer to use is also three letters, but someone on Microsoft’s vendor list is already using it, so I’ll have to pick a new one. And if you didn’t know, I did notice at least one vendor with a 2-letter ID lol
Now, the page mentions an email address that is missing. I'll follow up on that.
https://www.microsoft.com/typography/AboutMST.mspx
The email address is listed at the bottom, in the How to contact Microsoft Typography section, though not as a link.
I am not sure that would result in different ultimate foundry codes in the digital version, since I think they were both issued by the same digital foundry.
This would of course be easier if I could remember the family. German, early 20th century, I think?
(This link right now: https://www.microsoft.com/typography/links/vendorlist.aspx)
Just a quick background on why the Font Vendor Identification exists in the OS/2 table of the font.
During the implementation of TrueType into Windows 3.1, there were very few fonts available on the Windows platform. An application may request a font based on a reference in a document or to match a printer font, and it might not be available on the platform.
To help resolve this problem, several fields were added to the OS/2 table to help with matching fonts. This includes the sFamilyClass, panose, achVendID, ulUnicodeRangeN, and ulCodePageRangeN, as well as other unique metrics for the font and the typeface name. These values were not intended to be human readable, but instead to be integrated into the matching algorithm.
We added Font Vendor Identification to help the system refine matches where other metrics might be similar.
When Windows 3.1 shipped, we were pleasantly surprised at the number of fonts that quickly became available, and ultimately the need to find font matches quickly diminished.
I’m not sure of the present day value of this field, as the original intention is not a common use case, but there are possibly reasonable other uses of this value.
As Si mentioned, other values in the name table are more useful for human consumption.