D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk said on Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:51:25 -0400 (EDT)
Eventually, it was decided that US law (who cares about others) didn't allow copyright protection on fonts but did allow trademark protection on their names. That's why Apple called their Helvetica "Geneva", for example.
Just speaking for myself as a font user, trademarks but no copyright sounds good to me. If I had worked long and hard creating a wonderful font, I'd probably feel very differently, but the trademark but no copyright, in the words of Rick Hunter, "works for me!"
Reading that wikipedia article gives hints about how deeply aesthetic, perceptual, and rendering issues were considered. There is a certain worship of the Old School type designers. Any quick look at Computer Modern font will show that they were onto some things that Knuth was not.
If I were truly interested in deep aesthetics, I'd buy myself a caligrographed book from the early middle ages, before printing presses were invented. But my prioritiy isn't deep aesthetics. To me, it's all about readability. Most of the books I publish use Tex-Gyre-Schola, which is a knockoff of Century Schoolbook. Century Schoolbook was created for quick, glancible readability by eight year olds. And that quick, glancible readability works wonders for quick assimilation and efficient committment to memory of material for adults, even very smart ones, and even ones with less than perfect vision. In my opinion, if it's being printed to paper, Century Schoolbook is by far the best, even if it's meant for a second grader. And there's a special place in hell for these guys who publish in thin, reedy fonts requiring 20/20 vision to assimilate quickly. Century Schoolbook works for viewing book PDFs in a PDF reader. It's a little bolder than one might like, but it works just fine, even for people with lousy vision. When it comes to web pages, I usually don't declare a typeface. Another way of saying this is I don't second guess my visitor: His browser is set for the typeface and size he wants, I deliver text, and his browser renders it in his preferred typeface and size. This philosophy may or may not work with ePubs read by ePub readers. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com