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