[XeTeX] FontSite 500 fonts and XeTeX

[William Adams]

On Oct 13, 2007, at 12:04 AM, R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar wrote:

> William Adams wrote:
>
>> They're also no-name knock-offs for the most part and I've found that
>> they have kerning and spacing issues and problems w/ encodings (esp.
>> accents).
>
> Before I purchased the FontSite 500 CD, I asked  
> <orders at fontsite.com> several
> questions, the fourth of which was:
>
> "4. Are the fonts from different foundries or are they all from a  
> single foundry?"
>
> to which they replied
>
> "The fonts are licensed from URW."
>
> I am no font expert, but know that URW are a reputable foundry or  
> vendor. I took
> the above reply to be sufficient to guarantee the good quality of  
> the fonts.

I've got a stack of posters intended as a promotional piece where the  
use of accents resulted in hideously bad spacing at print time.


> I had assumed that the prefix URW in the font name and the  
> copyright laws would
> ensure that the font is not a cheap imitation. Your reply leads me  
> to think
> otherwise. Therefore, I looked at the URW Grotesk Regular file with  
> otfinfo so:
>
> otfinfo -i URWGRG__.ttf
>
> and got
> -------------
> Family:              URW Grotesk
> Subfamily:           Regular
> Full name:           URW Grotesk
> PostScript name:     URWGrotesk
> Preferred family:    URW Grotesk
> Preferred subfamily: Regular
> Mac font menu name:  URW Grotesk
> Version:             Version 1.50
> Unique ID:           FontSite URW Grotesk
> Description:         © 2002 The FontSite. All rights reserved.  
> www.fontsite.com
> Designer URL:        http://www.fontsite.com
> Manufacturer:        The FontSite
> Vendor URL:          http://www.fontsite.com
> Copyright:           © 2002 The FontSite. All rights reserved.  
> www.fontsite.com
> License URL:         mailto:info at fontsite.com
> -------------
> So, perhaps, this font too is a "no-name knock-off" as you have  
> suggested.

Actually no. URW Grotesk was an original design done for URW by Prof.  
Hermann Zapf, see _Hermann Zapf and his
design philosophy_, Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago, copyright   
1987, ISBN 0-941447-00-6, LCC 86-063752

That said, I'd liefer get a copy directly from URW which hasn't been  
through ``Sean Tools 1.0'' or whatever utilities Cavanaugh has come  
up with.

>> There're lots of better typefaces w/ clear provenance and imprimatur
>> --- better to use something which actually benefits the people who
>> created the original designs.
>
> I have the Adobe TypeClassics CD, which I believe is of "good  
> provenance". I
> thought that the FontSite CD, being a compilation "licensed from  
> URW", was in
> the same league. I was not aware that the original designers were  
> being hard
> done by in the latter case.

It's the better-known fonts which this applies to, the clones of  
Benguiat Gothic (Benjamin Gothic), Bembo (Bergamo), Futura  
(Function), Melville (Murray Hill), Micro Square (Microgramma),  
Unitus (Univers) even more egregiously, not even all of the fonts  
which appear under their own name provide royalties to their designers.

The short version of the story is that URW wound up w/ outlines for  
the clone fonts when they were paid to digitize them, but not paid  
extra to keep them proprietary --- the out was that they could use  
them on things other than printing equipment (the obvious intent was  
that they would be used w/ their line of Signus sign-cutting  
equipment), but URW saw an out to this when DTP came about.

> As for good quality fonts, I am aware of the TeX Gyre project.  
> Adam, if you
> could give me some links (off-list if appropriate) to other good  
> quality fonts,
> I would be grateful for that information. I am interested primarily  
> in book
> typesetting with English script, and for mathematics.

If you check the archives, you'll find some discussion of this ---  
the problem is that the typesetting of math using Unicode encoding is  
still in its infancy and there're few fonts which can be so used w/o  
a lot of hand-tweaking and other manipulation.

William


-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications