TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Thu Mar 14 10:53:08 EDT 2024

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FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE


ABOUT







SWFTE [Bill Dettering]

Swfte started producing thousands of fonts in 1985 by adapting or copying existing fonts. In 1993, they were sued by Adobe, Bitstream, Emigre, FontShop Canada and QED/Fonthaus. From the Seybold report: Adobe, Bitstream, Emigre, FontShop Canada and QED/Fonthaus had asked the court for a preliminary injunction to stop SWFTE from marketing fonts that were alleged to be pirated. The judge denied that request without comment. The five vendors then appealed, hoping that a higher court would grant the injunction. They have now withdrawn the appeal. This action will have no effect on the primary copyright-infringement suit, for which no trial date has been set.

Swfte folded in 1995. The Seybold Reports wrote: Expert Software, the supplier of software for composing forms and other applications, has signed an agreement to acquire SWFTE International Ltd., a supplier of fonts. The price was $7 million, plus 320,000 shares of Expert stock. SWFTE, which had revenues of $8.3 million last year, was at the center of a controversy over font piracy two years ago. Five font vendors charged it with illegal use of their fonts. The charges were later dropped after SWFTE changed some of its practices. A bit of digging reveals that Swfte International's cofounder in Hockessin, Delaware, was Bill Dettering. One of the main designers was Rich Roat. At Swfte, Dettering released Glyphix font software, the first ever on-the-fly font generator for DOS based systems, which sold over 50,000 copies, and over 100 scalable fonts.

Expert Software is now owned by Activision. Another product is Fantastic Fonts. Ulrich Stiehl's analysis. List of font names. Link to all the fonts.

Dafont link, where one can download Garage Shock (which is identical to House Industries' Playhouse).

EXTERNAL LINKS
Dafont page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
David and Goliath ⦿ Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ Font names/aliases ⦿ German type scene ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿








file name: Swfte International Garage Shock Condensed 1986 1995


file name: Swfte Cathedral 1986 1992







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