[Openfontlibrary] design service

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Dave Crossland wrote:

>> Publish all 200 Mbytes on wiki? :-)
>
> Publish them on the web elsewhere and add a link to the wiki.

OK

> If you need space, mail me offlist.
>
>>>>> Also, developing a high-quality typeface can be a lot of work;
>>>>> Microsoft spent over a million US dollars on Arial, I've heard.
>>>>
>>>> Other people report that Adobe's helvetica was digitized by kids of
>>>> Adobe's founders :-)
>>>
>>> LOL
>>>
>>> Got a reference for that? :-)
>>
>> Not in English ;-)
>
> Я все уши :-)

http://letterhead.ru/Thinges/opyt_03.html (a series of articles on
fonts localization by Yuri Gordon)

"На самом деле представление о том, что крупные западные шрифтовые
фирмы все делают с недоступной для нас аккуратностью, далеко от
реальности. В особенности это касается старых шрифтов, к которым
относится Гельветика. Эти шрифты были оцифрованы неизвестно когда,
неизвестно кем и неизвестно каким инструментом. Помню, что Андрей
Скалдин, наш основатель, рассказывал со слов каких-то западных людей,
что первые Постскриптовские шрифты оцифровывали дети основателей Адобе
Системз. Причем по самым разным оригиналам, полученным с разных фирм и
в разных масштабах. Наверняка Гельветика входила в их число. Потом,
правда, ее неоднократно переделывали, но вряд ли меняли эти размеры."

"Our impression that western type foundries do everything with
precision we are not likely to ever reach is far from reality. This is
especially true about old fonts like Helvetica. These typefaces were
digitized by god knows who and using god knows which tools. I remember
that Andrey Skaldin, our [Paratype] founder, told us once (and he was
told that by other people) that early Postscript typefaces were
digitized by children of Adobe's founders. Besides, doing this, they
used different specimens taken from different companies and in
different scales. Helvetica was most likely one of them. Later, of
course, it was improved many times, but I very much doubt that
descenders [that vary a lot, which was discussed in a previous
paragraph] were changed."

That's a quote from Vladimir Efimov. In the next paragraph he says the
old digitized fonts mostly keep the look of the first digitization
with all their rounding errors etc.

Alexandre