Post by James WilkinsonPost by Paul SmithThanks, Michael. I could not imagine that URW Palladio L corresponds
to Palatino.
Font copyright status is ... interesting. It turns out that it's a lot
easier to protect the trademark name of a font than it is to protect the
shape of the letters. So an independent font "very nearly" the same as
the original font needs a different name -- and one different enough not
to fall foul of trademark law.
http://www.typeright.org/feature4.html
http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html (the "What is really strange
about Arial" paragraph)
The designer of Palatino, Herman Zapf, has been known to do off-name
versions of his own typefaces for other foundries (notably
Bitstream)...
And http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/palladio/ says
URW Palladio
Designed by: Hermann Zapf
Hope this helps,
James.
The problem with these semi-professional fonts is: they are missing pair
kerning information either partially or totally. E.g. URW Palladio comes
with kerning for ASCII characters only. Which makes it unusable for
professional publications in non-ASCII languages (Polish, German,
Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Norvegian, Czech, Slovakian etc.). The
Original Palatino from Linotype takes the multi-lingual use of this font
into consideration and contains all kerning pair information. URW does
not. "Times New Roman" from MS has got the same problem. "Georgia" comes
with no kerning at all.
Thus even when the single character shapes are identical between two
fonts one can still produce messy output. Who wants to see the
difference, should try to print "Walter Tow" in different fonts, size 12
or 14, on a decent laser printer, once with pair kerning on, once with
off. (It's a setting in OpenOffice under "Format -> Character.)
BTW the missing pair kerning feature is a major obstacle for the
spreading of koffice, since this product has no kerning feature at all,
even when the font has got the pair kerning information.
FMF