A nice quality dingbat font (free!)

Here's a link to P Regular, a high quality dingbat font.
Attached is an organic pattern I made with it. Unlike a lot of dingbats, there are no imperfections here that you often find with dingbats when you zoom in.
Bob.

That looks like the old Adobe Wood Ornaments font.

You think? Maybe so. It's not bad. At first glance, some of the glyphs look 'Frank-Lloyd-Wrighty' ... that sort of sharp angled line style he used on a lot of his building decorations. I wonder, has enough time gone by that those old Adobe fonts are now out of copyright?

Gary, you nailed it in one. Although there are some glyphs from other sources, many of the glyphs in this typeface are from Adobe Wood Type Ornaments One.

Which doesn't invalidate this nice gift Bob has brought to our attention, and the metadata credits no creator, but only the program used to build the font (Metamorphosis Professional 2.03, in 1992).

Jon, commercial typefaces don not go by traditional copyright protection. You can copyright the name of a typeface—such as Tekton and Compacta, but the outlines of the glyphs within the typeface are often imitated, so you have "lookalike" typefaces such as "Technical" which is clearly "Tekton", and largely the creator of the typeface is unable to sue or get any sort of compensation for the devaluation of their work.

Once, however, there was a company called SWFTE who offered 20 or so "lookalike" fonts for ten bucks or something, and they were mercilessly busted because they didn't even bother to imitate the glyphs; they copied them from the original fonts, node for node. Bitstream, Adobe, Emigré, P22 and one other company, I think, were able in court to show that there was absolutely no difference between the glyphs in SWFTE's fonts and theirs.

This was a historic, but unusual suit, because typically you can't copyright the design of a glyph in a font.

The answer to your question, Jon, is no, not enough time has gone by for the names of Adobe typefaces to go out of copyright; copyrights have a 75 year life span now, I believe. But if you're skilled and know how to use a font editor, feel free to copy any glyphs you like—they are not subject to a copyright.

-g

Thanks both Garys -- it's true, font disputes are something else. So many versions of Helvetica, even back to Compugraphic days, and probably before! And years ago, I remember folks were complaining that Microsoft's Arial wasn't as 'good' as Adobe's Helvetica. I enlarged a couple of letters from each font to a zillion percent, and, sure enough, Microsoft had made some VERY small changes, but obviously enough to get out from under copyright lawsuits.

Sad about the copyright term extensions.

Hey, Jon—

The reason Arial came into existence was to provide users with a way to print documents that used Helvetica, to printers that weren’t PostScript. Linotype originally adopted something called Neue Haas Grotesk from the Haas Type Foundry, and reworked it into a family of fonts, and it was eventually renamed “Helvetica” so the name of this typeface would get more traction internationally.

Now if you look around, Max Miedinger was asked to create a font that could compete with the Berthold foundry’s highly successful “Akzidenz-Grotesk”. I have a digital copy of Akzidenz-Grotesk, and although it might seem like splitting hairs, this Berthold font, upon which many, many other sans serif gothic fonts were spawned, has a quirkiness that provides a little more visual refreshment than Helvetica does, when you have a lot of copy to set. Therefore, if someone is going to knock Arial as a pale imitation of Helvetica, you need to educate them that Helvetica was created to compete with an existing font that first appeared in 1896!

Adobe was one of the first companies to offer a digital version of Linotype’s font, and Linotype made certain that Helvetica was well promoted in ad agency circles with ridiculous print ads like this one.

Attachment 96381

Helvetica was being praised for its clean, neutral look, ideal for a variety of signage, which is sort of a different way of saying what the head designer of Arial said of Arial, that “it is bland by design.” Easy to read at small point sizes, inoffensive, not tainted by a discernible ethic heritage.

Microsoft commissioned Monotype to create Arial, and as far as legal repercussions over Monotype ripping off an Adobe asset…um, there really was none. Monotype already had created, owned, and licensed several weights of grotesque fonts, the legitimate ancestors of Helvetica.

Actually, the way I heard it, Monotype didn’t knock off Helvetica exactly because of professional pride. They wanted to out-do Helvetica, improve upon it to realize Arial. Some of the most obvious differences are that Arial has a lot more curves to its strokes than Helvetica. It was in part modeled after Times Roman. The counters (the holes in letters such as A, B, Q, and so on) are more open, allowing more crisp printing to non PostScript printers, and the strokes often end in a diagonal, and not a right angle terminator, as Helvetica does.

Arial is also easier to read on screen on Windows machines than the original Helvetica, because PostScript Helvetica originally required both a printer font and a screen font, and the first 100 or so Adobe Type 1 fonts had fairly poor screen fonts. On the other hand, Arial appeared as TrueType, both a print and a screen font rolled into one, and Monotype made sure it looked as good (or as bad as some would say) on screen as on the printed page.

I’d be willing to offer that it was politics that drove the technology, the creation of Arial. Microsoft asked Monotype to make sure the character widths were the same as Helvetica for one really smart reason: it allowed users to take a document set in Helvetica, swap the text to Arial, there would be no line breaks, unsightly rivers, widows, orphans, or two or more lines with hyphens—and the document would print to a non PostScript printer.

Remember that at the same time Adobe was developing, promoting, and refining PostScript technology, HP, Canon, and other companies were trying to develop alternative, faster, cheaper printing technologies. And until Adobe released Adobe Type Manager—an interpreter that would allow Type 1 fonts to be printed to non PostScript printers, you had to pay a grotesque price to use a grotesque font.

Just for the Helvetica of it,

Gary

Gary -- that is VERY interesting. Now let me ask you something. Over the years, here and at other places, I'll bet you've written a LOT of fascinating short pieces about typography, about commercial art, advertising, printing technology, graphics & computers, and so on. So what we would we have to do to get you to bundle it all up and sell it as a PDF (easy to do) or as a print book (maybe not worth the effort for the time you put in)?

There IS quite a history, isn't there -- so many stories, inventions, fads that come and go. Anyway, if I can get you to pull your notes and short articles together, I'll be your first customer!