Designers and design rights
Designers and design rights
- Subject: Designers and design rights
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 22:10:30 +0100
Edmund Ronald <email@hidden> wrote:
>I assume some red
>or liberal US photographers have also been known to occasionnally rent
>lights rather than buy them; Now why can't I rent CMS tools, software,
a
>spectro etc ? Why does the Eye1 Match license forbid the sale of
profiles?
This has been discussed wrt many packages. The argument is generally
that if a hardware manufacturer were to buy one profiling package,
build a profile for a make and model of device, and sell the profile as
part of the device bundle, then that is a gray zone where the features
exported from the profiling application into the profile are being used
to enhance a third party product. So is this becoming an OEM without
being asked or remunerated? Something like that is often the thinking.
The question now being asked about profiles was being asked ten years
ago about fonts. The reason we did not get QuickDraw GX merged fonts
(Type 1 is limited to 256 glyphs per font which is not enough by a long
shot) and line layout smarts (justification, spacing and glyph
contextual substitution rules added by the font designer) were that
small digital foundries as much as established foundries, while excited
about the technology, recognized that rampant font copying made it
unlikely that the extra work of turning a font into an application
would be financially rewarding.
Just before Christmas I asked Adobe about its OpenType progress and was
told that the last couple of fonts were being merged and released now.
So gone are the Adobe base and Adobe Expert days of Type 1. OpenType is
a wrapper both for PostScript math and TrueType math, so in that sense
OpenType is the ticket for PostScript type into operating systems other
than Jaguar (which supports it native). Even if there is a Windows
marketing reason for supporting OpenType, other foundries don't seem to
be following probably for the same reason as before.
From the point of view of the document designer OpenType is a nice to
have for Roman scripts, but it is essential for Asian and Middle
Eastern scripts which have many more glyphs (they are closer to their
calligraphic roots) and complex contextual glyph substitution (Arabic,
for instance).
This raises a problem for PDF workflows as creating say a Japanese font
with thousands of glyphs takes an army of type designers. Which is why
Asian foundries are traditionally unhappy about font embedding. Which
again means that for PDF to become the device independent workflow
backbone we all (should) want it to be, there is a problem of legal
dimensions.
Apple did a very good thing by bundling many Asian fonts for free with
Jaguar, for instance, the default Mincho style of Japanese type design
both as serif and sans. I miss the ductility justification of GX fonts
(the horizontal kashida in Arabic could grow or shrink and wasn't fixed
length), but otherwise Jaguar is about as good as it gets for the Mac
outside the Roman script / English language world.
I agree with type designers like Sumner Stone and Matthew Carter that
typefaces are no different than photographs or any other art. The
typefaces I have I don't copy. Likewise, I personally feel that
figuring out gamut mapping is a creative process. The difference is
that we have a tradition going back to the 16th century for naming a
typeface after the (digital) punchcutter and for identifying one person
with each typeface even though font production staff were involved, but
we have no tradition for naming a gamut mapping after or identifying it
with the color architect who engineered it.
OS level type and profile resources are necessary for device
independent PDF documents to maintain their look and feel whereever
they go, but I would not ask a photographer to release work royalty
free any more than I would ask a type designer or color engineer to
release all rights whatsoever. It really is a difficult discussion, but
it is also one which in all fairness has to be weighed from the point
of view of what one thinks about the fate of one's own design work in
the hands of customers.
Just my ten cents.
_______________________________________________
colorsync-users mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/colorsync-users
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.