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Thousands of TeX fonts at your fingertips (Linux.com)
Thousands of TeX fonts at your fingertips (Linux.com)
Posted Oct 24, 2006 0:07 UTC (Tue) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322)In reply to: Thousands of TeX fonts at your fingertips (Linux.com) by nix
Parent article: Thousands of TeX fonts at your fingertips (Linux.com)
> They do know that patching Computer Modern is treason, or blasphemy,
> or something, right?
It's the same deal as Firefox -- you don't try to pass your derivative
font off as the Authorised Version. But patching is fine if you change
the name. (I'm not sure whether the Authorised Name is
actually "Computer Modern" or the short form "cmr" though)
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Thousands of TeX fonts at your fingertips (Linux.com)
Posted Oct 25, 2006 23:06 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
No, that's not strong enough. Knuth's reaction when someone (Slackware?)*did* fiddle some tiny detail of Computer Modern without changing the name
makes it clear that this is more than mere copyright :)
Forget Linus getting religious about the GPL. Knuth's religious about TeX
producing identical consistent output everywhere, everywhen. Look at the
TRIP and TRAP tests: output computed *by hand* and then compared with the
machine's idea of it.
That sort of monastic dedication to the most nanoscopic details... *that*
is religious programming. (And it's really very impressive... from a very
long way away.)