Q on using the propeller font.

Chuck McManis · 2008-02-06 05:21

Hi Everyone,

So I really like the propeller (Parallax) font that lets me "draw" schematics in my documentation. I would like to use it for other things as well, the issue is with its Unicodeness. It does all the right things by adding a codeset (pointset?) with the schematic characters in it. However a lot of "legacy" applications don't really know how to deal with that (Word does but most HTML browsers seem to get weird)

I've got a freeware font designer that will let me move the glyphs from their location into a psuedo ISO-Latin8859 type font where some of the letters are replaced with glyphs (this is how the old Symbol fonts worked).

So the question was if I create a new font (say called Schematic.ttf) which was the schematic glyphs arrayed over character code points, am I going to get a lot of grief if I share it with my friends so they can do the same kind of stuff I want to do (in this case rapid generation of GIF images with schematics on them for dynamic display on web pages and in then potentially PDF documents) I realize the copyright law on fonts has a glaring loophole that I could drive through but I'd rather have a font that is giving Parallax positive karma every time its used rather than what is essentially a re-packaging of half their font)

Any chance of getting a font constructed this way from Parallax?
Thoughts? Comments? Parallax?

--Chuck

Oldbitcollector (Jeff) · 2008-02-06 05:23

@Parallax:

Please let him do it! This sound extremely useful...

OBC

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Mike Green · 2008-02-06 05:44

As a general statement (from observing Parallax for some time), they would not have a problem with you or someone else using their font as you describe. They are not likely to be able to put any effort into doing this for you ... They're too busy. They're likely to complain if you claim the font as your own or you claim that the modified font is a Parallax product or supported by Parallax. As long as you are honest about it: "I took the original Parallax font and modified it (as follows) to make it more useful for others. Thank you Parallax ... and don't bother them if you have problems ... I'd be happy to fix what I've done if it doesn't work". I'm sure that, if it took a huge amount of work, you would not have a problem charging for the effort you put in ... as long as you were clear about what you were charging for (and privately asked Parallax for permission).

Post Edited (Mike Green) : 2/6/2008 5:49:31 AM GMT