From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Apr 22 2004 - 12:05:36 EDT
From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <mark@kli.org>
> Raymond Mercier wrote:
>
> >I am intrigued by GB18030 encoding. There is a table of equivalences in
> >http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/~checkout~/charset/data/xml/gb-18030-200
> >0.xml
> >No doubt Unihan will at some stage include these 2 & 4 byte values.
> >
> >I enquired about the 'super font' created by a Beijing foundry,
> >http://font.founder.com.cn/english/web/index.htm, and am fairly astonished
> >at the prices, as you see from the attached.
> >
> (!!!)
>
> Something has to be wrong, since the website has a press release
> discussing how their Super Font is bundled with Microsoft Office XP, and
> even Microsoft's prices haven't gotten that high!
Most probably the price is for a redistribution licence. This is not clear here
how they would hope ever selling such fonts for single-user installations.
So I doubt that this font is made for end-users, but most probably for
manufacturers of appliances like mobile phones with small displays (probably the
only reason why one would need a bitmap font).
In that case, the US$20,000 per year is not exc essive it it includes the right
to embed this font into an appliance (the cost would fall to US$1 per device if
only 20,000 appliances are built. For the Chinese market where mobile phones are
exploding with distributions of millions of units, this does not appear
excessive...
For the PC market, bitmap fonts would have little usability (due to the wide
range of screen resolutions to support). So this does not appear as a severe
limitation. A giant TrueType fonts would be probably built with a library of
basic stroke subroutines (to simplify styling) and simplified descriptions of
the component strokes (length, orientation and relative position).
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