Microsoft Office 97 clipart converted to SVG | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Office 97 clipart converted to SVG

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Standard note that this is obviously still fully under MS copyright, so distributing the set is in the gray area at best. Just fyi if you got idea to use these anywhere, then I'd just shelve that and use some properly cleared images instead.

I don't think there's anything gray about it. I'd hate to be on the bad side of a bunch of Microsoft's lawyers.

Even if there's no perceivable harm from having the collection available, the lawyers will be forced to take it down just to protect their rights in other cases.

> he lawyers will be forced to take it down just to protect their rights in other cases.

Isn't this just a thing for trademarks? I was under the impression that regular copyright could be selectively applied since you can do things like grant private licenses to your work.

As far as I can tell even that is not quite accurate:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...

tl;dr: The bar for trademark abandonment seems to be quite high.

yes, it's only for trademark and even then it is rare. Frisbee still has their trademark somehow, even though everyone calls all brands of novelty flying discs frisbees

ianal, but im pretty sure im right.

“Frisbee” probably is “genericized.” The problem is that it takes a court ruling on it to know for sure, and no one wants to be the one to take that risk. It costs money to deal with the inevitable lawsuit, and if you lose, you need to fix it (and that costs a lot of money as well). OTOH, it costs (relatively) nothing do just choose a different name in the first place.

Pretty much all of the archetypal examples of trademarks becoming "genericized" are actually examples where the trademarks are still fully enforced. I'm not going to be able to get away with selling Bob's Kleenex or Happy Sheep Q-Tips anytime in the foreseeable future.

That entire lecture that everybody gets seems to me to be for the purpose of rationalizing sometimes extremely aggressive trademark enforcement to prevent something that has never happened.

There are some quite familiar terms that used to be trademarks, though: cellophane, dry ice, trampoline, escalator. As usual, Wikipedia has a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

So IANAL but could you use this if you owned MS Office? Presumably there is some kind of license for clip art specifically since it's for reuse.

So, I looked it up, and this seems to be the important part:[a][0]

> 3. You may use clip art for personal, noncommercial uses.

So, that’s that. A personal website or blog is ok, but not a commercial website.[b]

[a]: Couldn’t find it in a quick skim on the EULA

[b]: So it seems years ago, a lot of mom and pop shops violated that part...

[0]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vi...

Wow, that feels like BS. They sell a product called "Office" to businesses, then say parts of it weren't licensed for commercial use. Then you have to ask how the bundled fonts were licensed, because it'd be weird to license those for commercial use, but not the clipart.

AFAIK fonts are not copyrightable in most countries, what is copyrightable is the font file itself (of course) as well as the code (if any) for vector fonts that produces them. However using the font isn't copyrightable. The design might be under design patent and the name trademarked, but not the font itself and these really cover the entire font designs, not their applications. Someone printing a paper with the font isn't infringing on any copyright.

At least that is my understanding of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

As for the part that is copyrighted, it’s not just the code that makes the fonts (like what metafont would be), but also the bytecode embedded in the font file (for kerning and other things).

Yes that is what i meant. The curves aren't copyrightable since those aren't code, but the bytecode is copyrightable.

> I'd hate to be on the bad side of a bunch of Microsoft's lawyers.

Or worse: They might send Clippy

lovely.

I taught a class in 1996 using those human bean figures. A few slides into the class, people were stifling laughter. My take on Windows NT Server Administration might have been a joke, but I wasn't trying to be funny. Puzzled by this reaction, I stopped asked just asked the class: what was so funny? I wasn't angry at all, but I wanted to know.

"Um, those guys are pissing on your server."

Can't unsee.

Dang.

Which figures? I can't see any one of the bean figures that look like pissing :-P

I think he means the one that is in the link of OP, this one http://www.404techsupport.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/cli...

If you have a twisted mind, the hand can be seen as a detached penis

This one seems worse: https://clipground.com/images/screen-beans-clip-art-download...

Interesting choice to convert to SVG. WMF are smaller files and the specification has been released in 2017. LibreOffice supports importing/exporting and numerous other libraries also support the format.

For an archival format though, SVG is likely a better choice. The small difference in size is worth it for long term accessibility.

Except the conversion process is (never) quite perfect, so that's why I prefer original files with known provenance.

Just a random example, check out Popular/tennis.{svg,wmf}. And that is just something that is pretty obviously wrong, more worrisome are cases that are more subtly broken.

I've been working on the WMF/EMF/EMF+ code, where there is a problem log a bug with LibreOffice.

Thanks for pointing this out. It looks like LibreOffice may handle complex graphics better than wmf2svg. You can do batch conversion with it, too.

  libreoffice --headless --convert-to svg Popular/tennis.wmf

However, I haven't found a way to preserve the original canvas size. It seems you need to crop the image separately.

  inkscape --with-gui --verb FitCanvasToDrawing --verb FileSave --verb FileQuit tennis.svg

I'll try this method and upload the LibreOffice conversions in their own archive if they look good.

Edit: They look good so far. I'll upload them as SVG-LibreOffice.zip when they are done.

Any chance you can lodge a bug about the canvas size? It's a bit of a deep bucket, but good to have the issue lodged so eventually we can fix the issue.

It doesn't seem like a bug, more of a missing feature in Draw. What I mean by "not preserving the original canvas size" is that when you run libreoffice some-image.ext, Draw doesn't adjust the page size to the image; it puts the image on its default size page.

There are several related feature requests in the issue tracker (though none specifically for headless mode). The most relevant is https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81118, which asks for a feature to fit the page size to the drawing. https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49787 asks for different page sizes in a single document, which would make it possible to create a page of its exact size for every imported image as a default. The comment https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112888#c... links to several more.

I'm not so sure about that. I don't believe there's a reference implementation. SVG has also changed over time and is much more complex. WMF is stable and reliable with a reference implementation.

I recently digitized some VHS tapes, and settled on webm/vp9/opus (and DVD) as a lossy archival format because, like SVG, browsers support it, so it'll be around for a long time.

> WMF are smaller files

Depends. bestfrnd.wmf is 65 kB and 35 kB gzipped. bestfrnd.svg is 163 kB but after running it through SVGO it is just 87kB and 18 kB gzipped.

The WMF originals are included in Clipart.zip with the rest of Microsoft Clipart Extra. I made the SVG conversion thinking people may want to use the clipart on the Web and because more programs support SVG than WMF.

After trying several conversion tools I settled on https://github.com/hidekatsu-izuno/wmf2svg. It was the best in terms of quality (the backgrounds were properly transparent when they should be, for example) and targeted a vector format.

Wow! As a kid I used to play with the "group" and "ungroup" feature for clipart for Screen Beans, sometimes with circles of them sacrificing animals or something. I was a weird kid.

I will definitely need to play with this over the weekend.

None of the filenames appear to exceed eight characters in length. Did filesystems for Windows have a limit back then?

yessir, 8 characters filename plus 3 characters file name extension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.3_filename

If the clipart was to be usable by the Windows 3.x versions, or Windows 95 running on FAT, if I remember correctly.

Iirc long-filenames are stored as "invalid" directory entries regardless of FAT12/16/32 so if you had win95+ then long-filenames was everywhere (although not entirely sure but i guess win3.x/old dos could corrupt the extended part even if the short-form always was valid)

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