James Wilkinson wrote: > Paul Smith wrote: > >> Thanks, Michael. I could not imagine that URW Palladio L corresponds >> to Palatino. >> > > Font copyright status is ... interesting. It turns out that it's a lot > easier to protect the trademark name of a font than it is to protect the > shape of the letters. So an independent font "very nearly" the same as > the original font needs a different name -- and one different enough not > to fall foul of trademark law. > > http://www.typeright.org/feature4.html > http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html (the "What is really strange > about Arial" paragraph) > > Intriguingly, http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsia.html says: > The designer of Palatino, Herman Zapf, has been known to do off-name > versions of his own typefaces for other foundries (notably > Bitstream)... > > And http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/palladio/ says > URW Palladio > Designed by: Hermann Zapf > > Hope this helps, > > James. > > The problem with these semi-professional fonts is: they are missing pair kerning information either partially or totally. E.g. URW Palladio comes with kerning for ASCII characters only. Which makes it unusable for professional publications in non-ASCII languages (Polish, German, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Norvegian, Czech, Slovakian etc.). The Original Palatino from Linotype takes the multi-lingual use of this font into consideration and contains all kerning pair information. URW does not. "Times New Roman" from MS has got the same problem. "Georgia" comes with no kerning at all. Thus even when the single character shapes are identical between two fonts one can still produce messy output. Who wants to see the difference, should try to print "Walter Tow" in different fonts, size 12 or 14, on a decent laser printer, once with pair kerning on, once with off. (It's a setting in OpenOffice under "Format -> Character.) BTW the missing pair kerning feature is a major obstacle for the spreading of koffice, since this product has no kerning feature at all, even when the font has got the pair kerning information. FMF
