So what would be the legal, moral and technical situation if some imaginative independent designer were to make a set of five or six glyphs to address an issue like this. So one could purchase Linotype's Metro (or G 415) and then spend �10 or so on the extras.

Obviously if that designer were to work in partnership with the original foundry, that would help the consistency of the face, and also aid the marketing. But if the foundry refused to co-operate, could they stop someone from addressing this?

Is there any precedent?

I assume that Indy CS and the like would be able to handle the situation fairly easily.

Unless you re-use actual outline data, there can be no legal obstacle to making new glyphs. Ethically, many people will tell you the "Design" belongs to the original creator. Some even extend this to cover non-Latin scripts! To me this holds no water, because abstract things belong to society more than individuals (nothing is created in a vacuum), and the more people end up working on something needed, the more users benefit.

What I would do however is contact the makers of the original, and tell them of your plans; give them an opportunity to help, or convince you not to do it. But you decide in the end. Also: give proper credit for the original of course - although I guess in this case you'd have to do that to make the result useful!

hhp

Creating new glyphs (that match style, color, etc.) is not "modifying".

hhp

Hrant, creating new glyphs and adding them into the Metro font file is a modification. Making new glyphs and putting them in a separate font, which isn't called Metro but which you use along side of Metro is NOT a modification!

Can InDesign pull alternates from a different font? I'm thinking no, right? Could you do some sort of search and replace?

Tiffany, I'll ask about getting those alternate glyphs into Metro tomorrow, but it would probably take a while, even if they do opt to do it. Keep on me about it, and I'll keep on it!

>>Are you only going to add the a and g, or are you going to do the entire typeface proper justice?

Whoah there!
I'm not going to do anything - I'm no type designer. I just thought that if the consensus was that ths kind of thing would be ethical, legal and practical, someone who is a type designer might be tempted by the prospect of an interesting and small set of glyphs. Either out of interest or as a commercial project with a potentially reasonable return. (There's one customer here, and it sounds like there might be some more if the interest in Dwiggins' work is anything to go by). This would be much less work than a full character set, and might provide a useful project for an independent designer.
(I wouldn't rule mself out of considering some kind of financial support or partnership for such a project, though).

I would really like to see someone do justice to the face as a whole, but maybe that's too much to ask - adding the more interesting glyphs to the existing faces seems a more likely prospect.

BTW, I would agree with Hrant - I don't think this would be seen as modification

Sorry Dan - got distracted while I was typing that post and hadn't seen you're reply when I posted mine.

I agree that the second option - a separate font file would not be modification. That was what I had in mind.
Can InDesign not automate that. Maybe with some scripting...?

Steve, if you view my last post, you'll see that it isn't a modification if you do it right ;-). Anytime you open up an existing font and do anything to it, you ARE modifying it. But making a new font, comprised entirely of new glyphs which could be used together with an old font isn't modifying anything, because you aren't touching the original font data. Thanks for bringing this up though! Metro is a great face.

Ah! I just cross-posted you again! Sorry Steve!

Thomas, any InDesign tricks to make a two-font solution work?

You can do it with TeX and virtual fonts.

The Japanese version of InDesign has a composite font feature that can enable exactly this sort of thing. Some set of default glyphs in one font are replaced by glyphs from another font. I don't think it enables you to do them as alternates.

You could also use SING glyphlets to achieve the same thing, including your choice of having them as alternates or as default glyphs. SING is a newish Adobe technology for having standalone glyphs that add on to existing fonts. Again, it was developed primarily for the Japanese market. Currently it's available as a public beta for InDesign CS, but it would be reasonable to expect greater integration in the future.

Regards,

T

The ghetto way of doing it would be to search and replace all 'a's and 'g's of Metro with the new glyphs in another font. It's certainly easy enough to accomplish this in InDesign.

That's what I would probably do if adding glyphs to the font itself were impossible. Of course, it also depends on just how much you're using Metro. I have trouble trusting search and replace on large projects.

Check, recheck, and check again.

surely the most straightforward option would be to talk linotype/bitstream into an opentype version with the alternates...

sounds like theres a market for it.

veering off-topic, but i am suprised that more big foundaries haven't generated feature-rich OT versions of their best-selling fonts.

can you imagine gill OT with the old style figs on board, or joanna with small caps. what about a whopping version of times, with SCOSF & multi-lingual support...& avant guarde with a full set of alts/ligs/logotypes....

>veering off-topic, but i am suprised that more big foundaries haven't generated feature-rich OT versions of their best-selling fonts.

Trust me, Geraint, this is something that we ARE working on. These things take a lot of time though; at the same time that we want to ree-release old favorites, we also want to keep bringing new fonts to the market (plus all old AND new fonts need to get up to speed on supporting broader character sets, meaning exponentially more glyphs and potential bugs). I mean, the great old type designers aren't going to live forever�we all need *new* faces (or at least we all seem to *want* them)!

Unfortunately "our" favorite type designs might be your favorite ones, or even mine :-D. A foundry's favorites are usually the one that sell the most. Sadly, Linotype's updates to Helvetica, Univers, and Frutiger were all made before any applications could support OpenType features, or in the Helvetica's case, even before OpenType. We did just remake Optima and Avenir though. Zapf's newest revisions, when they come to market, will make more use of OpenType, too, I promise!

Now, Gill is another matter. Perpetua�my favorite typeface�as well of all other digital Gills (well, almost all of them�) are managed by Monotype Imaging. So, you'll have to ask them about those. I wouldn't be surprised to see even more of Gill Sans in the near future though� Monotype must of gotten a kick out of its being used for the Olympic Games in Athens.

>surely the most straightforward option would be to talk linotype/bitstream into an opentype version with the alternates...

Geraint, unfortunately we won't be able to release an OpenType version of Metro anytime soon, unless someone were to commission the change directly. I have e-mailed Tiffany and Steve about the details that such a commission would require.

I don't know what Bitstream's procedure is for handling these sorts of things, or how they choose which fonts to re-issure in OpenType updates.

If anyone has further questions about Linotype's OpenType re-issues, Metro, or custom design work, I'd be happy to answer your questions personally offline. Feel free to contact me via my Typophile user profile.

thanks for this info dan.