TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:30:37 EDT 2024
FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE
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Mai-Linh Thi Truong
Mai-Linh Thi Truong worked at FontShop in Berlin. Best known for the book coauthored with Jürgen Siebert and Erik Spiekermann: FontBook. Digital Typeface Compendium (= FontBook 4). The Fourth Edition was released in 2006. The original by Siebert and Spiekermann goes back to 1998. At one point Mai-Linh was in charge of policing the net, which on occasion led to false accusations while trying to protect FontFont fonts. Mai-Linh contacted the owner of typOasis complaining about the use of FF Mambo dingbats on the page. The web page owner was asked to remove these pictures. Turns out that the pictures were from Maraca Extras (WSI) and Listemageren's Mexican Ornaments. The Maraca font has this line: "Maraca From the WSI-Font Collection. Copyright [c]1994 Weatherly Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved." The FF Mambo (MediumInitials) font has a copyright notice 1992 Val Fullard. Both fonts are clearly extremely similar, and from the dates it appears that the Mambo font came first. If you bought the WSI collection, and read their notices, how could you know about this? And why does FontShop not take its complaints to WSI? Why this harassment of simple font users and font enthusiasts? I think that in this case, the user is right, and should keep using a font he/she paid for. If WSI copied the font and made money off it, are they not the real culprits? WSI's boss, by the way, drives a Ferrari. I am sure the typOasis owner does not. So, FontShop erred. But I am not sure even WSI is at fault: A bit of digging allowed us to discover that the Mambo glyphs were first drawn by R.H. Middleton in 1934 (see here). So, BOTH WSI and FontShop based their glyphs on Middleton's work. Now, why should typOasis not have the right to use WSI's version? By the way, over half the symbols in the WSI font are very different from those in the FontFont version! Some find the WSI version superior, both technically and aesthetically. |
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |