Need help preparing for copyright

Posted by brianlawler in

Release

9 Oct 2009 — 10:49pm

Greetings, all,

I have a handful of fonts that I have created, and I want to file the copyright for the computer code with the U.S. Copyright Office.

They ask for a certain number of pages of the "source code" from the beginning and the end of the "program" to accompany the application for the copyright.

I have no idea how to get to the "source code" of a font in order to do this.

Can anyone suggest a method for creating a listing of source, or anchor points and coordinate information, or something that I can submit?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Brian P. Lawler

Thomas Phinney
9 Oct 2009 — 11:15pm

Hey Brian,

Yeah, they didn't know about fonts when they wrote that.

It depends on the format of the font. If it's OpenType CFF or TrueType, you could use TTX to dump the code in text form. If it's Type 1, I would use an unencrypted PFA file to treat as the text/code form of the font.

Regards,

brianlawler
10 Oct 2009 — 8:14am

Thanks, Thomas,

Please forgive my ignorance. What's TTX? (My fonts are all OpenType).

It's great that you are with Extensis. Delightful people!

We're still using Hypatia with glee.

Brian P. Lawler
Typographic Insomniac

riccard0
10 Oct 2009 — 9:35am

According to Google:
TTX is a tool to convert OpenType and TrueType fonts to and from XML. FontTools is a library for manipulating fonts, written in Python. It supports TrueType, OpenType, AFM and to an extent Type 1 and some Mac-specific formats.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fonttools/

Thomas Phinney
10 Oct 2009 — 9:00pm

Yup. Download the TTX tool, and use it to dump your fonts into XML source files (which can also be recompiled into fonts with TTX).

TTX hasn't been fully maintained, so it doesn't deal with some new developments, like new formats of the OS/2 table, etc. But I don't think FontLab does any of that stuff yet, though Adobe's FDK can produce fonts TTX can't handle.

Regards,

blank
10 Oct 2009 — 10:03pm