TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 11:44:19 EST 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

ABOUT

Bill Davis

Bill Davis graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a Printing Management degree. He was Vice President for Marketing at Agfa Monotype in 2003, and quit around early 2004. In 2004, he co-founded Ascender Corporation, where he was VP Business Development. Wnen Ascender was bought by Monotype, Bill made the jump to Monotype.

At ATypI 2003 in Vancouver, his talk was entitled Steal this font: Fonts are at risk now more than ever before compared to traditional forms of software piracy. Type designers may not understand all the new software applications and technologies that allow End Users to distribute fonts with their documents on the Internet. What can type designers and font vendors do to address the threats and opportunities of these new technologies? This presentation will review the role of the EULA (End User License Agreement) and a variety of software applications and formats such as PDF, Flash and SVG. This abstract is subversive, starting with the innocent-sounding phrase "software piracy", as if fonts are software---they are not: they are just tables of data representing geometric forms. When I vectorize a Picasso painting, the data are not a program! This misreprentation is typical of Agfa and now Monotype. On various Agfa web sites (some of which pretended to be something else), the word "download" was used to invite friendly clickers, only to discover that in Agfa speak, "download" means "buy". It is ironic, then, that this deceptive marketing company joined forces in 2003 with the heavy-handed FAST (Federation Against Software Theft), as if "theft" is bad and "misleading" is not. On Typographica, Bill Davis says: We have worked for some time now to get FAST to recognize fonts in their software compliance programs. Fonts are software too. Almost every message of his pumps out this fiction, since, clearly, if fonts are not software, then there is no software copyright protection. On his web site, he is proud to be a policeman: Bill led the company's efforts to develop custom software to track unauthorized use of its trademarks and copyrights on the Internet, and to evolve their font software licenses to target the needs of e-books, web servers and other applications.

Speaker at ATypI 2013 in Amsterdam: Enhanced Web Typography with OpenType fonts.

EXTERNAL LINKS
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INTERNAL LINKS
David and Goliath ⦿ Type scene in New York ⦿ SVG typefaces ⦿