[Gs-devel] Any suggestion to support "/FSType" and OS/2 table?

[L. Peter Deutsch]

> TrueType, OpenType, and newer CIDFont include embedding permission in
> "fsType" in OS/2 table, or /FSType in /FontInfo dict. I hope if font
> embedding reflects them.

First of all, the /FSType entry in the FontInfo dictionary is not documented
in the PostScript Language Reference Manual, Third Edition, or in the 3011
Supplement, so Ghostscript does not look at it.

Ghostscript currently does not look at fsType in the OS/2 table.  This is a
deliberate choice.  There was a lot of discussion on one of the PDF mailing
lists last year or the year before about the fact that some very widely used
font software (Fontographer?) sometimes puts incorrect information in
fsType, and in particular sometimes marks fonts as "do not embed" even
though the person who created the font intended to allow embedding.  So if
Ghostscript used fsType to prevent embedding, it would sometimes be acting
against the wishes of the font creator, and would be preventing people from
doing things they should actually be allowed to do.

My philosophy is that font embedding is a legal issue, not a technical one,
and should be governed by a license, not a bit in the font: it should be up
to the user, not software, to decide whether embedding a given font is
allowed.  The same font may be embeddable in some circumstances, and not in
others, depending on the license; Ghostscript does not, and in my opinion
should not, attempt to guess what license is being used for the font.

I am no longer responsible for Ghostscript, so my opinion is just my
opinion.  The decision about what to do in the main Ghostscript release is
up to Raph Levien, who now owns the Ghostscript copyright.  Of course,
anyone can make their own release that does something different.

-- 

L. Peter Deutsch     |    Aladdin Enterprises   |  203 Santa Margarita Ave.
ghost at aladdin.com    |  http://www.aladdin.com  |  Menlo Park, CA 94025

	The future of software is at http://www.opensource.org