Yeah. We're all really lawyers. ;-)

Maija, like Tiffany said it depends on the particular font house, so be sure to ask them*. MS is the only one I know of that prevents any modifications for any purpose, but most font houses are happy if everybody using the font in any form has paid once for it. Some small foundries (like Tankard for example) try to insist on doing all modifications themselves, but to me that sort of thing is more of a personal decision on your part rather than "professionalism" or something. The more you support type designers the better for type in the long term, but you have to worry about yourself too.

* On the other hand, if you feel their position is unreasonable (not to yourself, but in the overall), I personally advise taking things into your own hands. That's how society really works, although "officially" they'll never admit that...

hhp

Hi Maija,

Something you may have missed is that you don't generally 'buy' fonts, you 'license' them. So any rights to modify and further distribute the modified font would be documented in the font's end user license agreement (EULA).

Most, but not all, font vendors prohibit modification. Those that allow modification require that the recipient be a licensee of the original font.

Finally, do you have a link to an official source that lists the requirements for rendering Latvian?

Cheers, Si

> Most, but not all, font vendors prohibit modification.

Really? Is this a new trend? I thought most houses allow
mods as long as it doesn't leave the licensor's computer.

hhp

>MS is the only one I know of that prevents any modifications for any purpose

Hrant, you obviously don't spend much time reading font licenses ;-) which is a shame because there's plenty of material there to complain about...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=font+eula&btnG=Google+Search

Cheers, Si

You're right, Simon - I guess my defence is that I have more interesting things to read! On the other hand, a while back MS* was indeed the only one to prohibit any mods outright, no? But you're right, of the first three EULAs in that Google result, Bilak's seems to allow "internal modification" (it's really ambiguous, maybe on purpose), while the other two don't. I think the latter stance is stupid, because all it does is reduce trust between seller and buyer. Telling people they can't do something they'll do anyway can only serve to reduce your authority. It's much better to look the other way, and follow the other road you mention: "Those that allow modification require that the recipient be a licensee of the original font." And when anybody asks me, I'll advise against buying fonts from such a control-freak font house: if you have to go to the original designer for an internal mod on something you've paid for**, you're opening yourself up for delays and extortion. And a font house that gains one extra commission by forcing the modification to revent to it is losing more than one commission by tricking the customer (with an unexpected clause in the EULA) into buying something with hidden fees.

* Which you could say was a special case, since OS functionality was involved.

** To me the difference between buying and licensing is just legalistic trickery.

hhp

I have mixed opinions about this. On the one hand, I expect to be able to approach a foundry and say "hey, I really need to add East European support to one of your fonts I've already licensed; you already own all modified versions by virtue of their being derivative works, so you can sell my results to a new market and claim all resulting profits." In some cases this may prove a good idea; in others, I can see how a foundry would not want to keep track of which characters are available in all the third-party-modified fonts that result, to say nothing of quality control or phone support in God Knows What Language. Then there's the matter of getting phone calls from service bureaux cos this or that third-party version of this or that font is clogging a RIP.

Expanded character set support is nice to have and will be much easier to implement because of things like FontLab and OpenType. But you have to respect the costs that foundries have to bear once such modifications are introduced. I would encourage you to keep such considerations in mind when approaching a foundry about modifying their fonts, and think of ways to make it easier for them. I wish this were simpler, but it's not.

> you have to respect the costs that foundries have to bear once such modifications are introduced.

The only cost is pissing off the occasional confused user who doesn't get that the party responsible for the mods is the party who did the mods - i.e. not the original font house.

In the case of MS, most of its users are confused, so the mod prohibition makes more sense. However, MS is also rich enough that their [wonderful] type department doesn't have to make money -and of course it doesn't- to stay alive, and MS doesn't exactly need charity, so in the end it's essentially Fair to [internally] mod their fonts.

hhp

>Finally, do you have a link to an official >source that lists the requirements for
>rendering Latvian?

I doubt that one exists, but I can try and find out. There's the general thing that we have 11-13 non-standard characters in our alphabet (two of them aren't used anymore and as such are optional) and there are some common rules how to create them worked out by few old educated folks and followed by some others like me. Nothing complicated, but I'm not that good in therminology to explain more details.

Why are you interested?

The general problem is, there's no education specifically in type design here, moreover, there's no education in graphic design at all, so all we poor people can do is to grab all the tidbits that fall off the great and educated folks like you here ... Or purchase books at amazon.com (I'm currently waiting for my copies of Elements of Typographic Style and Type in Use.. exciting! :P).

>you obviously don't spend much time reading
>font licenses ;-)
Oops, that's something I should've done in the first place. Will have to take a look.
The general part about EULA's is - if you don't like a clause there but still must have the product - is there an option to have that clause removed? Nope, and you have to "license" to use the stuff anyway. So no wonder people don't read them - if they need the product, they "Agree" and that's about it.

Maija, the thing about agreements is they are written by lawyers and they are written to be understood by lawyers. They have a different language, I think its based on slug or worm. So you read an agreement and you're finished and its like you didn't read anything. There was a thread in the design forum about a sleasy contest by a lawyers association in CA for redesigning there logo and what we did was send logo ideas to them. One of mine was the joke: Whats brown and white and looks good on a lawyer, a pit bull.

>Why are you interested?

I work for a software company and I'm responsible for having characters added to some of the fonts we bundle with our products. It would be good to properly support Latvian if we're not supporting it already.

Cheers, Si

When foundries start paying for the right to license formats I'll start paying attention to the claims they make against modifying fonts I have "licensed" from them.

Fontographer never got the rights to allow modification of certain Microsoft TrueType fonts that contain a certain kind of kerning, since they could not provide support for this. One would think that they must have secured rights from other major suppliers of formating to allow their own software to be used by their customers without concern for liability. So it you modify via Fontographer, and I assume FontLab, there must have been certain rights secured that circumvent any claims additionally made by piggie-back foundries?

This conspiracy theory is a new one to me. AFIK Fontographer has never been able to modify TrueType fonts. The very act of loading a TrueType font into Fontographer and saving it without changing anything corrupts it.

Si

Didn't Fog5-beta have TT capability?

hhp

If that's true I take back exactly half the bad things I've ever said about FOG. It's almost a shame that the product is dead.

Si

Maija, I believe EKI letter database lists all the letters (with images) needed to write Latvian:

http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?lang=lv+Latvian&script=latin

If you need to get to know about the special glyphs used for Baltic and other languages, bookmark http://www.eki.ee/letter/ - it's very useful source...

Hmm... seems the first link doesn't work as it's supposed to. Well, anyway, go to www.eki.ee/letter/ and select Latvian for the question:

What special characters are needed to write...

> www.eki.ee/letter/

This seems like a great resource!

Can the extended-character-set experts here figure out how good it really is?

hhp

BTW, is this true?

"
The acute accent is used as a stress marker in Dutch. It's pretty much equivalent to writing a word in bold or italics. The accent can be placed on any vowel or vowel combination. A typical example is the numeral "een" (one), which is often written as "��n" to distinguish it from the article "een" (a, an).
"

And apparently a stressed "ij" needs an acute on both letters?!

hhp

I can't say if all the chars in every language there are 100% accurate, but at least Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian seem to be. Since the database is composed by the Institute of Estonian Language, I expect it to be a credile source.