Why TrueDoc?

     
     
     Bitstream is committed to honoring all legitimate rights of type 
     designers and foundries throughout the world. The following influenced 
     the rock solid design of TrueDoc and positions it as the premier font 
     technology choice for internet developers.
     
     Bitstream and Adobe were the key players in persuading the US 
     copyright office in 1991 to change its position from one in which 
     fonts had no protection into the current position in which font 
     programs enjoy the same protection as any other software programs.
     
     Bitstream and Adobe led the lawsuit against Swfte for copyright 
     infringement of their font software programs. As part of the 
     settlement, Swfte acknowledged its acceptance and agreement with the 
     U.S. Copyright Office rulings permitting the registration of copyright 
     in certain programs used in the generation of digitized 
     representations of typeface designs in the same manner as other 
     programs.
     
     Bitstream has designed TrueDoc to provide publishers with identical 
     font capabilities when publishing electronic documents that they have 
     always enjoyed when publishing documents on paper. This makes fonts 
     just as useful in the emerging "distribute-and-print" world as they 
     were in the old "print-and-distribute" one and hence creates new 
     opportunities for font vendors.
     
     TrueDoc accomplishes this without embedding fonts, or subsets of 
     fonts, into electronic documents. It doesn't even access the original 
     font files themselves. Instead, TrueDoc captures the character shapes 
     that result from executing the fonts -- just like what happens when 
     printing the document on paper. Storing these compressed character 
     shapes with an electronic document guarantees that it can be viewed or 
     printed on any platform, anywhere in the world. If the original fonts 
     happen to be available at the viewing/printing end, they are of course 
     used. If not, the character shapes stored in the document by TrueDoc 
     provide a high fidelity alternative. All of this is accomplished 
     without risk to the font designer's intellectual property -- which 
     never leaves the point where it was legitimately installed.
     
     Because the TrueDoc approach is the electronic equivalent of printing 
     first and distributing second, it automatically gives publishers of 
     electronic documents the same rights and responsibilities in the use 
     of fonts as if they were distributing paper documents.
     
     Bitstream is alarmed, therefore, at the prospect of the wholesale 
     embedding of fonts into portable documents, with or without the 
     owner's permission, that seems to be implied by recent web font 
     announcements.

Received on Friday, 29 March 1996 17:54:28 UTC