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- Mostly-free OCR B
-
- This font is used in UPC bar code symbols, including the ISBN symbols on
- most published books.
- A freely distributable version seems to be sorely needed. Until now, it's
- been very difficult to find the font in computer-usable format except by
- paying a high fee to a commercial font vendor. Even many serious commercial
- publishers have so much trouble getting it right that they just go ahead and
- use Helvetica instead, or even (shudder) Arial. Since the OCR B font is
- required by an international standard, it seems like it ought to be free.
- So here it is. The font in this package is not a "ripped", pirated, or
- shadily reverse engineered version; every effort has been made to ensure
- that it genuinely derives from free sources and all the creators involved
- have actually intended it for free public use.
- Converted by Matthew Skala from Metafont format to Postscript and TrueType
- formats, July 28, 2006, using mftrace 1.2.4 by Paul Vojta, which is
- available from
- http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/
- and Autotrace 0.31.1 available from
- http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/
- The Metafont files (not included - see notes below) were coded by Norbert
- Schwarz in the 1980s, based on German standards documents. He has attached
- a notice, notably not actually claiming any copyright - see the file
- "ocrbinfo" - saying that the fonts are "given to free non commercial use",
- but commenting that he is only free to grant rights to his own work on the
- digitization, because he did not design the original letter forms. He
- suggests that there may be other copyright claims attached to the letter
- forms themselves, which Schwarz credits as being originally designed by
- "Adam Frutiger" [sic], almost certainly a mistake for Adrian Frutiger. My
- (Matthew Skala's) understanding of copyright law, at least in the USA and
- Canada, is that in fact typefaces per se cannot be subject to copyright
- claims, so the software embodiment is the only thing subject to copyright
- and Schwarz's release makes it available for whatever "non commercial use"
- means.
- To avoid muddying the waters further, any copyright claims by Matthew Skala
- on these files are hereby released to the public domain. I'd like for these
- fonts to be freely usable even in marginally commercial applications, such
- as to generate UPC labels for books that will be sold for profit, but it may
- not be within my power to grant that myself because I didn't write the
- Metafont files although I did do considerable, and probably copyrightable,
- work on the translation to Postscript and TrueType. It was *not* a purely
- automated process; try using the tools I used and see how far you get
- without human editing! I'd also like for these fonts (the fonts themselves
- as opposed to documents made with them) not to be sold, not even indirectly
- by those Web sites that advertise "free downloads" but make it difficult to
- actually download fonts without paying a fee.
- NOTE: This ZIP archive is a stripped-down version containing just the
- essential files for using the main OCR B font on most systems. If you want
- the much larger complete package, which contains Metafont sources and several
- variant fonts (reverse-video, outline, and slanted), look for a ZIP archive
- called ocrb-complete.zip wherever you found this one.
- Matthew Skala
- mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
- http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
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