Modification Briefs - Best practices

@Hrant H. Papazian, darling... That really isn't why.  Can we please not insult each other?  You can think we are wrong headed but please do not suggest that we are anti-cultural villains.

@Hrant H. Papazian The only thing you achieve with such posts is eye rolls from the people you might have hoped to convert to your viewpoint.

More importantly, as far as I can tell your post and this discussion are taking the thread off-topic and do not answer any of Katy’s questions. So if you’d like to discuss your stance on modification, I’d suggest you do it in another thread.

I don't have a standard policy on allowing or prohibiting modification. Unlike Hrant, I think either policy can be culturally valid, and where I am wary of allowing modification it is specifically because I am concerned about quality and about shoddy workmanship appearing in something that is, after all, primarily associated with my name and that of my foundry. If someone modifies one of my fonts, and uses it to publish a book, that modification appears in the context of my typeface, and the reader of the book has no way of knowing that I'm not responsible for the poorly positioned diacritic with no kerning that occurs frequently in that particular text. So I am wary of allowing other people to mess with my fonts. But I don't disallow modification outright, because that doesn't make any sense to me: some modification might be low risk, while other modification might be high risk (also, not only in terms of quality, but the likelihood of the modified font escaping into the wild). So I want customers to contact me about modifications, to explain what they want to do and how they propose to do it. This isn't about negotiating a price — there generally isn't one, unless I'm actually asked to do the modification myself —, but about having some measure of oversight and being able to give the customer advice.

When A2-Type's Antwerp typeface was selected for the English texts of the Murty Classical Library of India, it needed to be significantly extended and customised, with many additional diacritics for transliteration of Indic scripts and less swashy forms of a couple of italic uppercase letters. I wrote the spec for the modifications, and Harvard University Press approached A2-Type to obtain permission. I went to meet with the type's designer, Henrik Kubel, when I was in London, and we ended up collaborating on the modifications. Later, when some additional diacritics needed to be added, Henrik said he was happy for me to do that work, since he'd been reassured by the previous process that I wasn't going to mess it up or do a disservice to his typeface.

This is culture. It's not a one-man-job, but it exists in discrete instances of creation and in interaction between creators. Sometimes we interact with the dead, which means interacting through the work — e.g. as Henrik interacted with the makers of 16th Century types in the Plantin-Moretus museum —, but when we're interacting with the living, it is best to do so in person.

Of course, all this implies a timeframe that is different from the deadlines under which Katy is made to work. I say 'made to work', because things could be different organised than they are at OUP — as Brill has done, for instance. In the MCLI project, HUP had a long lead-time, and of course were planning a whole series, not suddenly realising that the font they'd selected for a given book didn't contain one of the diacritics needed for the text. But I think it is worthwhile considering under what conditions such a realisation even could be sudden and require a 48 hour turn-around. This isn't how books should be made.

If that is how books are made, then one has to adjust a lot of expectations to match, including expectations about what kind of fonts one can use.

I should also point out that modifying a font independent of the source files for that font is not a trivial thing, and the amount of work involved and the number of things that can get broken in the process is significant. A few years ago, I was asked to add some smallcaps to a libre font that some friends were using in an academic festschrift. Initially, I had trouble locating source files for the libre font, and when I did find them they were in Fontforge format. In the end, I decided it would be easier for me to build fresh sources from the decompiled OTFs in FontLab than to familiarise myself with enough of Fontforge to do the work in that program. Today, the likelihood of libre font sources being available in UFO format reduces some of the headache, but the fact remains that if one wants to modify a non-libre font, even if the EULA permits it one may not be able to do so easily or without risk of e.g. being unable to recompile aspects of the font such as decompiled GSUB and GPOS tables. It's one thing for a foundry to grant permission for modification; another for modification to be a practical option.