[OpenFontLibrary] use of (c) typefaces

[Ed Trager]

Hi, all,

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Ben Weiner <ben at readingtype.org.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Maybe we should have some kind of WhatTheFont client in admin panel to
>> check uploaded fonts for being actually (c) typefaces
>
> As Ed Trager says in his reply, Fontaine reads license fields from uploaded
> fonts. Fontaine is an important part of the OFLB not least for that reason.
>
> I think that reading the license from the file is a good thing to do. I
> think trying to match outlines is less good. The first is like a tick in a
> box ("Is this font correctly licensed?"). The second is like saying "We
> don't trust you. So we checked up on you! You are bad because our algorithm
> said so!" This reminds me of the surveillance/database state - something
> that is happening very quickly in the UK and makes me unhappy.
>
> So that is an emotionally-coloured answer :-(
>
> What the Font is a great tool though - love it ;-)
>

What the Font indeed must work by analyzing bitmaps more or less using
the principle I described in my previous posting of subtracting a test
bitmap from a known bitmap in the database and looking at the
"residue" left over : less "residue" means a better match.  It still
seems like a hard problem to me:  First, in the case of a system like
WhatTheFont, you must have a good algorithm for aligning and scaling
bitmaps to the right size before trying to subtract one from the
other.  Secondly, if you have a large database of bitmaps, just using
a brute-force approach to match the test glyph bitmap against every
bitmap in the database seems inefficient ... Ideally one would want a
way to create some sort of digital "fingerprint" from the full bitmap
that could be used as an index key for rapid retrieval of
closely-matched glyph bitmaps.  Of course there have got to be ways to
do this.  But, as I said, it seems like quite a bit of work to me ...

In fact, I wish I knew about some of the ideas for doing such
"fingerprinting" of similar images for the purposes of indexing, etc.
:  Knowing how to do that would also provide a nice way to show a user
related fonts.  Similar to what web sites like Amazon Books does, but
for fonts: "If you like this font, take a look at these similar fonts
..."

- Ed




> Cheers,
> Ben
>
> --
> Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html
>
>