Foundries Allowing Modification

KP Mawhood

How much does yet another digital Garamond really belong to the guy who mostly wrapped outlines around existing ideas?

If that typeface is released as font software, potentially quite a bit. I would consider an OT Var Garamond to be an advance its digital predecessor. Revivals are a different discussion to modification permissions.

Here again positioning typefaces as essentially software is misleading.

Font software models software licensing, rather than content tool permissions. How is that misleading? It's a modification clause, typeface and software are linked.

John Hudson

Hrant,

Assuming the modified font doesn't get redistributed, the difference between changing the font and changing the image is essentially academic.

I don't think so, because of the nature of a font — to paraphrase what I recall you saying on Typophile once — as a little machine for making text. Modifying a font is not equivalent to modifying the image of an individual text, because a modified font can be used to produce any number of texts. So there is a quantitative concern related to the qualitative concern. To put it another way, the distinction between the means of production and the thing produced is never essentially academic.

John Hudson

Shahab,

I do design typefaces too. I'm not saying it's not important to protect the thing we do. I have seen a couple of times that the exact unique thing one of my typefaces had had been distorted.

Oh, I've seen my Gabriola typeface fake bold more times that I've seen it displayed as intended; also obliqued, stretched, squished, rendered in neon — okay, so that was pretty cool! —, and amateurishly handpainted.

Khaled Hosny

I don’t mind people messing my fonts, I release them under OFL without RFN after all. OK, I actually do and I got annoyed few times when people created badly modified versions of some of my fonts, but that is no worse than people using in in application that does only minimal Arabic shaping and miss all my beautiful contextual alternates. There are more things in life to care about than people messing some font, no matter how a labor of love craftsmanship it was.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

(For the record, all the posts since this one have been off-topic. But somehow I don't expect a moderator with a hatchet to execute a perfectly-timed bit of censorship... Which is fortunate since we're enjoying a fruitful digression. Thank you.)

@Tiffany Wardle Cool, thank you for the link. I meant a new one.  :->

@Katy Mawhood Fonts are software by circumstance, and all the structures that make software be so useful to society are missing; we don't even have variables, much less looping, conditionals, [pseudo-]random number generation, boolean operators, etc. There can of course be many definitions of software, but to me things like PDF, HTML and fonts are description languages, not software.  Which is fine because in the end what makes a typeface (not merely a font) be itself is how it looks. This is what makes it unfair to make draconian claims of ownership of derivatives, etc. Perhaps the best reason we see fonts as software is because that's the only way to get US copyright protection... That might be a necessary evil, enabled by a conveniently loose definition of software, but at least in this company let's be honest about how virtually all typefaces are evolved, not invented.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

John Hudson said:
to paraphrase what I recall you saying on Typophile once — as a little machine for making text. Modifying a font is not equivalent to modifying the image of an individual text, because a modified font can be used to produce any number of texts.

Good memory. The exact wording was a slogan of sorts for type designers: "We make little machines."

Yes, it's not equivalent, but whatever you could do with the modified font you could also do by modifying its rendering (even though that's admittedly less efficient). It's only when the font exists of its own in the world that it alters the landscape. I guess you could however say that the modified font alters the landscape of the entity it's confined to.

Adam Twardoch

I think at least some of these concerns are a bit antiquated.

On the web, I can create a one-glyph font that I specify  as being the one to be used for a given character while the "original font" is used for all other characters — all without  modifying the original font file. The one-glyph "fontlet" won't be able to interact with the glyphs of the original font in terms of kerning or other features though. 

I can also have a script that uses a library such as opentype.js that loads a web font and then, in browser memory, modifies the font (e.g. adds or changes a few kerning pairs) before it gets displayed.

This is not very different to what's already widely happening — pretty much every operating system or app modifies the type designer's original software program. For example, the type designer may have programmed TrueType instructions to modify the glyph outlines at certain pixel sizes, but most apps or systems discard these instructions partially or completely, or they modify these instructions on the fly when the font is being displayed. 

And of course the end-users often perform drastic programmatic modifications to original font software for example when they create PDF documents