Fonts

[absque fenestris]

With fonts and licenses, it's a thing. There are original fonts and royalty-free substitutes under imaginative new names.
And there is a Helvetica font hidden deep in a subfolder of a Linux PDF application...
Actually - Helvetica!
This font copies and installs turns out to be a copy of the already lousy Arial...
This so-called Helvetica is also very peculiar under > right click > properties: Messrs. Miedinger & Hoffmann are largely unknown there and the creator of the font is a Mr. Anyway.

Whoever has the license for the Helvetica at the moment and however this is handled as a free or unfree typeface: I find it a huge cheek if the original designers are embezzled.

Microsoft with Segoe sends its greetings.

By the way, we don't need to be astonished when PDF's under Linux simply look miserable...

[xenopeek]

Which program are you talking about? apt-file find helvetica does not return any packages from the repository that have a .ttf or .otf file with that name.

The Internet says Helvetica is free to install on desktop systems provided that the user agreed to its EULA. This is the same as for old Windows fonts you can install for free on your desktop system.

PDFs look fine for me. I have the Liberation fonts installed which provides an Arial replacement with Arial being a Helvetica replacement.

[absque fenestris]

Hello xenopeek

The facts:

Dateisystem (German) > opt > master-pdf-editor-4 > fonts > standard > Helvetica.ttf + Bold, Oblique etc.

Info (Mate Schriftanzeiger):
Helvetica
Regular
TrueType-Schrift
2.00.1
Digitized data copyright (c) 2010 Google Corporation.
Copyright (c) 2012 Red Hat, Inc.
Copyright (c) 2016 Code Industry Ltd.
Based on Arimo, which was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Arial™. Arimo offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.

About history of the Helvetica typefont:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica

Maybe I'm stupid or I've misunderstood everything in my - already a long time ago - student days, but Max Miedinger with Helvetica and Adrian Frutiger with Frutiger were the holy gods of Swiss typography.

As you can see from the above info Miedinger simply doesn't exist and Microsoft has renamed the Frutiger cheeky and arrogant to Segoe.

The letter kerning and the microtypography in Linux (also in Windows...) is a chapter in itself. It's good enough for your own office needs, but if you want to set yourself apart from the competition as a graphic designer, it's desperate.

[xenopeek]

Master PDF Editor includes a EULA that covers what you can and cannot do with it. By downloading the software you agree to be bound by the terms of the license. Section 4 of the license says:

You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble the Software or create any derived products, based on Software or any of its components.

The license file is probably on your system as /opt/master-pdf-editor-4/license.txt.

However the included font named Helvetica is licensed under SIL Open Font License 1.1. From https://tldrlegal.com/license/open-font ... -explained the summary of the license is:

OFL is used by almost all libre fonts. Selling fonts by themselves is not allowed, but bundling with software or selling font design services is allowed. Font names must usually be changed before making any modifications. Document embedding is allowed.

So Master PDF Editor can bundle the font and you can use it for embedding in your documents.

As to why it is called Helvetica? It seems to be a font similar to Helvetica but not actually Helvetica.

[absque fenestris]

I'm not a lawyer. These provisions may be all well and good, but from a design point of view, the so-called Helvetica in this program simply has no connection with the original Helvetica. If I want a Helvetica, then I want a Helvetica and not a copy of the Arial.
And why a copy of the Arial is listed as Helvetica I don't understand as a graphic artist.
Maybe nowadays lawyers are the better typographers - it wouldn't surprise me...

[xenopeek]

Well, you've posted this in the Linux Mint support forum and seeing as this is non-free software (closed source) we can't tell you much more about it's development history (no public record such as commit logs that we could peruse). If you want clarity on why Master PDF Editor have a font called Helvetica that appears to be instead a derivative of Arimo, you'll have to contact its developer.

[gm10]

I'm not a lawyer.

It's no infringement of copyright to the original Helvetica font but it's infringing the Helvetica trademark that's registered for fonts (unless they obtained a license for the use of that name, which is rather unlikely).

[absque fenestris]

Well, you've posted this in the Linux Mint support forum and seeing as this is non-free software (closed source) we can't tell you much more about it's development history (no public record such as commit logs that we could peruse). If you want clarity on why Master PDF Editor have a font called Helvetica that appears to be instead a derivative of Arimo, you'll have to contact its developer.

You're right: wrong forum, irrelevant topic.

[absque fenestris]

Plagiarisms of plagiarisms are also not better under Linux than in the other system...
And a prose that reminds me a lot of how to do a tax return doesn't make the whole thing any better...

... and to my knowledge the mention of the original author costs nothing. But it is a question of decency.

[xenopeek]

Have you contacted Code Industry yet?

[Faust]

...... irrelevant topic.

I disagree , I think it is a highly interesting topic , thanks for posting .

I know next to nothing about design / graphics etc. but I realized a while back just how much work goes into
the creation of a font .

......
You're right: wrong forum, ......

Might be better if moved to Open Chat ...... but still interesting

[lsemmens]

I cannot contribute much to this thread, however, I have found it interesting, and would like it to continue. Maybe the mods could re-direct it to the appropriate forum, if they deem it better suited to that.
Thank you to all who have contributed thus far.

[xenopeek]

Moved it to open chat. OP will still have to contact Code Industry to get an actual answer to the question.

[Portreve]

It may be of some interest to note Linotype maintains web pages abound font creators. Here's the one for Max Miedinger.

And here's a TEDtalks video by Matthew Carter, another fairly accomplished font creator.

[absque fenestris]

Moved it to open chat. OP will still have to contact Code Industry to get an actual answer to the question.

I think twice before I send official requests to any companies...
The company in question seems to be legally protected according to the written information.

Digitized data copyright (c) 2010 Google Corporation.
Copyright (c) 2012 Red Hat, Inc.
Copyright (c) 2016 Code Industry Ltd.

...and as an individual I will definitely not mess with these companies.

But as I said - the design of the aforementioned typeface has nothing to do with the original - except for the name.
By the way - there is also the good old Times in the same folder - also in an extraordinary quality...

[absque fenestris]

@ Faust

I know next to nothing about design / graphics etc. but I realized a while back just how much work goes into
the creation of a font.

This website may be interesting for those interested in type design:

http://www.georgduffner.at/ebgaramond/

The development of the open source EB Garamond is well described and on a downloadable PDF (Specimen) you can see the insane effort necessary for a good typeface.