The following message by Yummy on comp.fonts gives some interesting examples of poor fontmanship by major foundries. Read on to find out which ones. ___________________________________________________________ Article 97602 of comp.fonts: From: Yummy.NO@SPAM.skuz.net (Yummy) Newsgroups: comp.fonts In article <37EB984F.8D00AE7D@YandY.com>, Louis Vosloo wrote: >Yummy wrote: > >> In article <37EAE587.C480730D@fiam.net>, Dick Margulis > wrote: >> >Well, Yummy, I asked for and did not yet receive a refund; but that's >> >the nice thing about Visa Platinum. I can let the credit card company >> >get the refund for me. No muss, no fuss. However, if I were to post the >> >font to abf, umm, I think that would pretty much rule out a refund, >> >don't you? > >> I don't. Not necessarily, at least. First, I also wrote 'or email', second, >> I (or someone else) *might* just fix it for you. Now, I agree with you >> on credit cards but would like to note that exactly this kind of crap, >> *not* piracy, is hurting software industry - no refunds, no >> functional evaluations, no nothing, just give them money and they >> run with it. > >Crappy fonts pretty soon get a crappy reputation, as do foundries >supplying >them. Umm... Disagree. Emigre (crappy by every standard) prosper. I have large number of Elsner&Flake and their PFMs (style/font name/font family/copyright) are total mess. Linotype Palatino Unicode shipping with Win2k has all glyphs named 'null' - probably only to embarrass Zapf. Practically all dingbats from Fonthaus come set to standard encoding, even though they share not a single glyph with it. Even more shamefully, all Font Bureau and Bigelow&Holmes TTFs shipped with M$ Office (including Lucida, hehe) come with no kerning pairs whatsoever. The list goes on and on. Your statement is equivalent to 'crappy software pretty soon gets a crappy reputation, as do companies supplying them'. Unka Billy became by far the richest man in the world supplying the crappiest crap known to humankind. Sad but true. >There are plenty of postings on this news group complaining >about some fonts or some foundry. Actually, there are very, very few of such posts (I mean, except Emigre, of course!). You, as someone who follows this group for some years, know it. :-) >And anyone paying for one of those >zillion >fonts - and six steak knifes - for $39 CDs pretty much get what they >deserve. Yep, and those suckers who eat at McDonalds and drive Toyotas deserve it too. To think of it - they could go Maxim's and buy Lamborghini. Oh, horror! >As for evaluation copies, that's not so easy to arrange given how fonts >work >since you can't time limit or useage-count limit or restrict to >particular >machine they are installed on. Which is presumably somebody's conscious >decision. Someone not favourably inclined towards font foundries... Certainly is. I heard a rumor that that somebody was M$+Adobe. Makes sense to me, actually. >However, Adobe's Type on Call provides one way of doing this, which is >to have fonts >that have just a few characters in them - not useful to do any real >typesetting. >Is that the kind of thing you are advocating? Sort of. That is better than nothing, but I like plain shareware model better. It works, it is beyond any doubt by now. >As for refunds, you'd have to believe that all copies of the font would >actually >be deleted, which probably happens in most cases of people getting >refunds for >software they already installed, but given the disregard for >intellectual >property displayed with respect to fonts - such as on this news group - >I don't >see much hope of persuading any foundry that this is a positive aspect >of >their business model. That is because 1) they, like you, operate on the presumption that majority of the human population consists of dishonest individuals eager to steal. This is most likely incorrect; 2) they stick to a stupid elitist marketing model that assumes that they can only turn profit on overpriced goods. Y. ------------------------------------------------------