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Commit | Line | Data |
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4188f38a | 1 | Mostly-free OCR B |
2 | ||
3 | This font is used in UPC bar code symbols, including the ISBN symbols on | |
4 | most published books. | |
5 | ||
6 | A freely distributable version seems to be sorely needed. Until now, it's | |
7 | been very difficult to find the font in computer-usable format except by | |
8 | paying a high fee to a commercial font vendor. Even many serious commercial | |
9 | publishers have so much trouble getting it right that they just go ahead and | |
10 | use Helvetica instead, or even (shudder) Arial. Since the OCR B font is | |
11 | required by an international standard, it seems like it ought to be free. | |
12 | So here it is. The font in this package is not a "ripped", pirated, or | |
13 | shadily reverse engineered version; every effort has been made to ensure | |
14 | that it genuinely derives from free sources and all the creators involved | |
15 | have actually intended it for free public use. | |
16 | ||
17 | Converted by Matthew Skala from Metafont format to Postscript and TrueType | |
18 | formats, July 28, 2006, using mftrace 1.2.4 by Paul Vojta, which is | |
19 | available from | |
20 | http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/ | |
21 | and Autotrace 0.31.1 available from | |
22 | http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ | |
23 | ||
24 | The Metafont files (not included - see notes below) were coded by Norbert | |
25 | Schwarz in the 1980s, based on German standards documents. He has attached | |
26 | a notice, notably not actually claiming any copyright - see the file | |
27 | "ocrbinfo" - saying that the fonts are "given to free non commercial use", | |
28 | but commenting that he is only free to grant rights to his own work on the | |
29 | digitization, because he did not design the original letter forms. He | |
30 | suggests that there may be other copyright claims attached to the letter | |
31 | forms themselves, which Schwarz credits as being originally designed by | |
32 | "Adam Frutiger" [sic], almost certainly a mistake for Adrian Frutiger. My | |
33 | (Matthew Skala's) understanding of copyright law, at least in the USA and | |
34 | Canada, is that in fact typefaces per se cannot be subject to copyright | |
35 | claims, so the software embodiment is the only thing subject to copyright | |
36 | and Schwarz's release makes it available for whatever "non commercial use" | |
37 | means. | |
38 | ||
39 | To avoid muddying the waters further, any copyright claims by Matthew Skala | |
40 | on these files are hereby released to the public domain. I'd like for these | |
41 | fonts to be freely usable even in marginally commercial applications, such | |
42 | as to generate UPC labels for books that will be sold for profit, but it may | |
43 | not be within my power to grant that myself because I didn't write the | |
44 | Metafont files although I did do considerable, and probably copyrightable, | |
45 | work on the translation to Postscript and TrueType. It was *not* a purely | |
46 | automated process; try using the tools I used and see how far you get | |
47 | without human editing! I'd also like for these fonts (the fonts themselves | |
48 | as opposed to documents made with them) not to be sold, not even indirectly | |
49 | by those Web sites that advertise "free downloads" but make it difficult to | |
50 | actually download fonts without paying a fee. | |
51 | ||
52 | NOTE: This ZIP archive is a stripped-down version containing just the | |
53 | essential files for using the main OCR B font on most systems. If you want | |
54 | the much larger complete package, which contains Metafont sources and several | |
55 | variant fonts (reverse-video, outline, and slanted), look for a ZIP archive | |
56 | called ocrb-complete.zip wherever you found this one. | |
57 | ||
58 | Matthew Skala | |
59 | mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca | |
60 | http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ |