Antique Fonts Collection – Restored 19th Century Typefaces | Hacker News Reader

Antique Fonts Collection – Restored 19th Century Typefaces

centurylibrary.com

31 pointseustoria14 comments

I've been doing some bookbinding projects recently, e.g. some of William Morris's works originally published by his Kelmscott Press, and have been typesetting them using some replica fonts. This is a very cool project.

I do wish they'd provide more details about where a given font comes from. For instance, CL Antique No.1's uppercase bears a strong resemblance to Morris's drop caps used in News From Nowhere, but there doesn't seem to be a reference to what CL Antique No.1 is based on.

Or maybe I'm just missing that somewhere?

Yeah, I have some questions to add to their faq: https://centurylibrary.com/license-info/

* Will you actually sue anybody who doesn't follow your very fussy rules about what they can't do with the public domain works that you've scanned?

* Will you win if you try?

* Do you deliberately hide the original sources and names in case people go straight to the source instead of paying you?

* What happens to the rare books after you scan them?

I expect that copyright protection on these would be pretty thin. Copyright doesn't exist on mechanically generated lists (e.g. the phone book) since they do not involve any creativity. Since the page explicitly says that that the fonts include the "charming" warts and all, and they only include the glyphs originally printed, one could make a good argument that their intent was mechanical translation to a digital format rather than a creative process. If you could demonstrate that the glyphs were essentially scanned in, for instance, that would bolster the argument.

> Will you win if you try?

Pretty sure that depends on the court, and isn't something you can determine in advance.

selling limited commercial licenses for fonts generated from public domain works (without any attribution?) seems gross to me

Popular works regularly mine the (public domain) past. Disney animated movies like Cinderella did so. Seth Grahame-Smith did so with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. and so on. That is literally the benefit of copyright expiration, that other people can utilize and transform a published work.

asserting exclusive ownership of a product entirely from the public domain is absolutely not within the free culture ethos

would you sell me a commercial license for Pride and Prejudice itself?

Agree. There's some impressively modern looking output, however. Quite elegant. Seems like a relevant place to repeat a quote I collected:

There was a romantic tradition, in this country at least, of the drifter Typesetters, who were good enough at the craft to find work wherever they traveled. They'd work in one town until they wanted a change and then drift on. They had a reputation for being well read, occasionally hard drinking, strong union men who enjoyed an independence particularly rare in the 19th century. - Clark E. Coffee (founder of Graphion, a phototypesetting company in SF)

I actually don't mind it. They did the work of generating the font files from the public domain works, and you're paying them for that work.

If someone took a close-up photo of a statue's stone texture, I don't see any problem with someone editing the photo and selling it as part of a texture pack for 3d modeling. I feel like what was done here involved a roughly similar amount of transformation. I agree that the right thing to do is attribute the source, though.

I had ChatGPT write me a program that takes their .webp files as input and outputs TrueType fonts that work on Mac or Windows. No membership required.

Font-cloning of dubious quality not novel to the LLM era!

https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html

> Anyone who has a digital "OPTIfont" and a font editor can readily view the problems, including usually several times too many Bezier points within any character. I counted 78 control points on a minimal character, for instance, that should have had less than a dozen.

For a lot of folks, they're never going to notice the difference, but this gets into target audience sophistication, etc. etc.

(edit for clarity: I'm pretty confident the ChatGPT typeface clones would be low quality. Notable too, however, that the Century Library ones might also be!)

AI-assisted de-copyrighting of proprietary works might be an unexpected social good. Please release everything into the public domain. Although, in this particular case, converting rasterized images back into fonts is likely very lossy in terms of embedded information.

Would be keen to see a blog post on this topic that shows if/how the quality differs from the source fonts!

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