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[157.131.108.81]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id o14sm3629719pgh.48.2021.02.11.09.34.15 for (version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 bits=128/128); Thu, 11 Feb 2021 09:34:15 -0800 (PST) To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org References: <8b580c46-ecfb-9383-ed43-08108b3ee7bf@tllds.com> <20201130163753.GB18187@mcvoy.com> <202102102236.11AMann01820861@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <4be538bd-a4ee-4287-4d61-9cc6e18c061b@mhorton.net> <20210211025253.GX13701@mcvoy.com> <8412062A-2360-4464-B834-2567AEA69C0D@humeweb.com> <31617.1613048783@hop.toad.com> From: Jon Forrest Message-ID: <34f3d83f-c33e-83de-cb59-12209a7ff729@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 09:34:11 -0800 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.7.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <31617.1613048783@hop.toad.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" On 2/11/2021 5:06 AM, John Gilmore wrote: > This reminded me of a project that I and a small team did in the 1980s. > We were licensees of Sun's NeWS source code, and we wanted our software > to be able to use the wide variety of fonts sold commercially by Adobe > and font design companies. The problem was, they were encoded in Adobe > Type 1 font definitions, which Adobe considered a proprietary trade > secret. > > Our team ended up pulling the ROMs out of an original LaserWriter, and > writing and improving a 68000 disassembler. One of our team members > read the code, figured out which parts handled these fonts, and how it > decoded them. He wrote that down in his own words in a plain text > document, not a program, following the prevailing court decisions about > how to avoid copyright issues while reverse-engineering a trade secret. > Ultimately, we released that document to some interested people, so that > others could implement support for Type 1 fonts. Shortly afterward, > Adobe magnanimously decided to "release the specification", as Wikipedia > says. I always thought the Prof. Michael Harrison and his group in the CS Dept. at UC Berkeley were the first to do this. I found a reference to this in https://books.google.com/books?id=IToEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT7&lpg=PT7&dq=michael++harrison+berkeley+postscript+fonts#v=onepage&q=michael%20%20harrison%20berkeley%20postscript%20fonts&f=false Plus, Mike told me personally that this is what happened. Jon