URW/SoftMaker history (was Re: Success story)

WillAdams@aol.com WillAdams@aol.com
Wed, 11 Apr 2001 02:47:12 +0200


In a message dated 01-04-10 17:34:02 EDT, you write:

> BTW, my fonts are from a CD-ROM in Sean Cavanaugh's book Type Design.
>  According to the AFM files the copyright is by URW & SoftMaker, but
>  there is a comment "Generated using Fontographer 4.1 and SeanTools" --
>  I wonder what he has done to the fonts. Any comments regarding the
>  quality of this stuff are welcome.

I've never understood Sean Cavanaugh's on the one hand claiming to admire 
people like Matthew Carter, and on the other hand, distributing their work 
without compensation to them.

The fonts bundled with _Type Design_ are a varied lot---many of them have bad 
spacing problems/lousy sidebearings/ridiculous kerning tables and thereby not 
metrically compatible with anything else.

URW on the other hand, found itself in a funny situation when the fonts which 
they'd digitized, became commercially viable beyond the sign software which 
they'd been providing them to.

William