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Font discussion

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 1:46 pm
by Trilarion
A special type font would surely increase the graphical appeal of the game. I would like to have something resembling the original Imp1 font or something close to a victorian/imperial era type. That is with serifes, more straight, not too thin and a bit playful but old-style:

My commercial favorite currently would be Caslon:
Caslon Example
Caslon Example
CaslonExample.jpg (9.35 KiB) Viewed 13897 times
My current open source favorite: Fanwood or Neuton.

Re: Font discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2012 2:23 am
by Veneteaou
Imp1 used Belwe Light BT, Belwe Bold BT, and Book Antiqua (regular and bold). I liked the one you've mentioned, and I'm sure that if someone in the community is obsessed with recreating the Imp1 experience as closely as possible that they will write a short little guide on how to pull the fonts from Imp1 and into our remake.

Re: Font discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2012 11:32 pm
by Trilarion
Thanks for finding the names of the used fonts. Now this is really interesting. Belwe looks nice and the creator "Georg Belwe" is/was a german who artist who lived and worked in Leipzig quite close to the street I grew up, maybe 500m away.

And Belwe looks fantastic. Nice decorations of the letters. It just seems to be from a different time. Exactly what I imagined.

Actually they want money for it, so not easily usable in an open source project. However Belwe was invented in 1907-1912, so copyright might be gone already and it might be a mere question of digitalization?? I will keep an eye on it.

Re: Font discussion

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2012 1:05 am
by Veneteaou
I did some looking yesterday, and it seems like the Belwe style was designed back then, but these specific Belwe fonts were copyrighted 1990-1993. Now Imp1 is abandonware, and that font floats around with it - could we take a chance to put it into a non-profit project like this without anyone caring? There is no money in it for them regardless, so at worst we would receive a cease and desist (at least here in the US; I don't know about Germany if we end up releasing there). Something to think about moving forward.

And I still maintain that the easiest way to get it into the game is to let the information slip to players that they can move the font from their original Imp1 folders.

Re: Font discussion

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:06 am
by Trilarion
I think we cannot and should not put something we know is copyrighted into the package. After all there is a real loss, we publish it as open source meaning, everybody can use it for anything and some will. The potential loss is even infinite. I don't want to risk that. If the design (not the actual type font) is free we might make it a sub project to digitalize the font as a free version.

And we can give information about how to extract it from the original. But then it is completely in the hand of the user if he chooses to do so and where he gets the original from, he might even buy the font. ;)

Abandonware is not a legal description. In principle all content of Imp 1 is still copyrighted an unavailable to us except for inspiration. That's why I am keen on reinventing it.

Re: Font discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2012 3:36 pm
by Trilarion
I found a free version of Belwe Gothic by Dieter Steffmann. Obviously if you digitalize them yourself there is no copyright. At least that's what's written here. Even modern design aren't copyrighted per se. Sounds a bit strange. Digitalization is not the most difficult thing in the world.

Re: Font discussion

Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2012 5:53 pm
by Veneteaou
Interesting... Perhaps there is someone here who could make that happen for us, so we can focus on artwork and coding?

Re: Font discussion

Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2012 11:37 am
by Trilarion
So I contacted Dieter Steffmann, who offers all these fonts for free to ask one or two things. His answers:

- These fonts (including Belwe Gothic) are "free for everybody for non-professional use". This is a bit fuzzy but I interpret it as compatible open source with the limitation of non-commercial. This can become complicated for example if the software is compiled on a DVD and sold for a small fee. But it's sufficient for now.

- If we want to have these and other fonts as open source we just have to digitalize them ouselves, therefore we need a type table from the original type setting company or from ebay or from newsgroups or from books (type collections). Getting these sources seems like a job for a historician. It has not the higest priority for our project, but I find it a very interesting side project. We should definitely come back to this.

- Although some fonts can be availabe digitalized for free, sometimes they had to change the names, because these can be registered trademarks. Not for Belwe though.

And I also contacted Monotype/Bitstream because I found the Belwe fonts for free download on sites that didn't look obviously like frauds. The answer was that all of them are not authorized.