[OpenFontLibrary] Tooth notation fonts

Sun Feb 8 16:47:33 PST 2009

Hi guys,

I’ve been following the list for the last week and was going to write  
a nice long introductory post about me and my thoughts on open source  
free culture and my own undertakings in cultural politics. But then I  
see this post and this is such a great cause that I’ll just hop in!

You see, I’m an artist and I teach design, and that makes me ambigious  
about making new typefaces and images that are unrestricted by  
proprietary rights, as I actually plan on making money with my  
proprietary rights.

But I hadn’t realised we could put our skills and know-how to such  
immediate and completely utilitarian use as helping out the British  
dentists! So here goes:

1) (correct me on this one if I'm wrong) I can’t see how your fonts  
could possibly be infringing someones intellectual property.

As for the notation:
- The notation originated in 1862, so it has no copyright anyway
- If you make a notation and you want it to get used, you’ll do your  
best to clear all legal ramifications
- Apparently it was adapted by mr Palmer. So if you want to be  
absolutely sure, you should find the article in which he proposes is,  
find out to which standards body he submitted it, find out what they  
did with it and how they licensed it. But it would have been a hard  
thing to copyright seeing as it was just a reimplementation of a  
public domain specification.

As for any typeface you base your font on:

- Copyright with typefaces is actually more difficult to determine  
than with most other forms of intellectual property. That’s the reason  
why there’s such a hassle about it anyway.

> A few years ago with the help of the GIMP I created some bitmap
> characters, but as I delved deeper it seemed that creating fonts was
> actually very difficult and avoiding copyright infringements would  
> make
> distribution of the characters fraught with problems, so I left things
> alone for a while. Even the characters I created may have infringed
> somebodies copyright. I don't know.

If you drew your own glyphs, then you’re fine. They might resemble  
another sans-serif, but Microsoft could make Arial from Helvetica,  
Adobe could make Myriad from Frutiger, etc.

If you used an existing typeface that’s open source, that’s also OK,  
then you can use the same license on these drawings. If you used a  
copyrighted typeface for your Gimp drawings, that does pose a problem.  
In that case you should probably redo it.

> Maybe I don't actually need to create any characters I just need to
> learn how to amalgamate some of the existing Unicode characters and
> fonts to produce the symbols I want.

As long as you start from a copyleft font, that approach would make  
the most sense IMHO.

You could probably already create a pixel font from what you have now.
But you could make a scalable one by basing it on another font.

I’d recommend Free Sans as it has a large coverage of glyphs.
Bitstream Vera and it’s derivatives I find to be awful looking.

One that might even be better, I just added the link to the wiki
http://dev.naver.com/projects/nanumfont/
It’s a monospaced coding font with a large line-height as to fit the  
Hangul characters. But it’s coverage of many Unicode ranges is large,  
and it has a huge collection of geometrical glyphs.

Anyway, I’m sure many of the people here could help you out with the  
concrete technical implications. I never made a font myself, but I’d  
say what you want to do is relatively trivial for someone who knows  
this stuff.

Hope this helps you!

Eric

P.S. is there a way I can scramble my mail address so it doesn’t show  
up in the mailing list archives?

Op 9 feb 2009, om 00:55 heeft Mark Preston het volgende geschreven:

> Hi all,
> I'm interested in creating some free font characters that may be  
> useful
> for the field of dentistry. In particular to enable the writing and
> encoding of Palmer tooth notations.
> See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Notation_Method
>
> There are already some similar unicode characters available that might
> be useful for me - see
> http://www.decodeunicode.org/en/miscellaneous_technical
> For instance:
> U+23C0 DENTISTRY SYMBOL LIGHT VERTICAL WITH CIRCLE
> U+23BE DENTISTRY SYMBOL LIGHT VERTICAL AND TOP RIGHT
>
> A few years ago with the help of the GIMP I created some bitmap
> characters, but as I delved deeper it seemed that creating fonts was
> actually very difficult and avoiding copyright infringements would  
> make
> distribution of the characters fraught with problems, so I left things
> alone for a while. Even the characters I created may have infringed
> somebodies copyright. I don't know.
>
> For an overview of the characters I created see
> http://www.markpreston.co.uk/fonts/palmer.png
>
> These were based on the article
> "The Palmer notation system and its use with personal computer
> applications" by J W Ferguson.
> This article gave some ideas on implementing the generation of Palmer
> type characters - mostly for Windows based machines and Microsoft
> applications
> Ref.
> http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v198/n9/full/4812303a.html
> Eg.
> "Those using the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, however, can
> create their own Palmer notation characters with a little-known  
> function
> called Private Character Editor (PCE) which is already included with  
> the
> software. A description of the procedure is given in the appendix.
> However, whereas a freestanding font generated with proprietary  
> software
> can be distributed and installed on any personal computer, PCE
> characters cannot be exported. This is of no consequence if the user
> simply wishes to produce hard-copy output, but has implications for  
> the
> electronic transmission of documents"
>
> There have been some ttf type dental fonts produced in the past that
> have been distributed by other people, and for the purpose of this  
> email
> request I have put them as a zipped file available for download at
> http://www.markpreston.co.uk/fonts/dentalfonts.zip
> The Palmer type characters are in the den6f___.ttf file.
> I think there may be some limitations on the distribution and
> modification of these files, but there may not be. I don't know.
>
> Anyway, I would be grateful to have some advice from the cognoscenti  
> on
> how to best proceed with the aim of getting some free/libre font
> characters to use ideally under Linux in programs such as TeXmacs,
> OpenOffice, Icedove and Iceweasel. Also, the characters should ideally
> enable reasonable printing out of documents. If they work on other
> programs and operating systems then so much the better.
> I have set up Fontforge to create the characters/fonts, and I thought
> that maybe creating some BDF fonts would be a good starting point. In
> terms of Unicode are the characters best placed in the Private Use  
> Area?
> Maybe I don't actually need to create any characters I just need to
> learn how to amalgamate some of the existing Unicode characters and
> fonts to produce the symbols I want.
> Any advice would be gratefully received.
>
> Thank you,
> -- 
> Regards,
> Mark Preston

Eric Schrijver

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