[sword-devel] Unicode font (Arial Unicode MS)

[David Burry]

At 03:26 PM 6/17/2001 +0200, Joachim Ansorg wrote:
>Hello David!
>
>Are you emplyoed by Adobe?

Yes.

>  Some time ago I downloaded an unicode font from
>Adobe, this font worked very well with the chinese CHIGU module.

I believe they have several fonts that compose of glyphs for the entire 
Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) as defined by the Unicode standard (probably 
version 3.0).

Unicode 3.1 and the three new Asian encodings it supports with extensions 
in additional Planes poses some new technical challenges because there are 
no font standards in place (yet) that have more than 256 or 65536 character 
positions possible.  So far there are only 1 byte and 2 byte standards as 
far as fonts go.


>Do you think it's possible that Adobe sponsors a complete or nearly complete
>Unicode font for Crosswire?
>Maybe we (Troy :) could print something like "Kindly sponsored by Adobe!" on
>the CDs?

I know Adobe's policy about philanthropy is that religious organizations of 
any kind don't qualify (I've tried and it was easier to just donate myself 
for the same end result), but I can certainly check with the type and legal 
depts and see what our options are.  They do these kinds of licences all 
the time for other things so it seems logical that it shouldn't matter if 
SWORD is open source or not.  I do know that Adobe stays in business with 
(and therefore my paychecks come from) royalties for these kinds of things, 
but I can check if it's possible that any royalty could either be waived in 
exchange for acknowledgement as you suggest, or at least be paid by an 
individual or organization in one lump sum not per copy distributed, or 
perhaps there's some other way.  If they wanted royalties and we (Troy ;) 
determined this was the best route, I'd be willing to personally contribute 
to the fund.  Ideally there's at least one font that will not require any 
royalty, but I don't know yet for sure if there is one...


>Joachim

Dave