Rubicon

Highly Engaged Employees

Works ineligible for copyright protection, fonts During the period 1991 to 1998 Rubicon produced a number of font clones. There were many small companies doing this but we survived because our font clones were digitised accurately at high resolution and were better quality than most. In the USA typefaces and bitmapped fonts are not copyrightable bu... t scalable fonts are. Anyone with sufficient time and skill can make an original representation of a typeface as a scalable font and copyright it. For information on font copyright laws in the USA and elsewhere refer to the links at the left or consult a lawyer. In 19911992 we produced a series of fonts based on the Computer Modern designs from TEX and Metafont. These brought critical acclaim but not much revenue. The look of the Computer Modern fonts was not mainstream. We provided some of these fonts as demo fonts for Fontographer 3.5. In 19931994 we produced a series of fonts based on popular designs like Garamond, Frutiger, Kabel, and Optima. This was successful until 1997 when companies like Microsoft, Corel, Adobe, and Apple started bundling high quality fonts with their software. In 19951996 we produced a series of fonts that emulated the base fonts of Postscript and PCL laser printers. For Postscript printers this was Times and Helvetica and for PCL printers this was CGTimes and Univers. This turned out to be a great idea because it meant that you could print documents that looked like they came from an Apple LaserWriter or Hewlett-Packard LaserJet on a much cheaper printer. We also added Light and Extrabold weights as well as Condensed weights to several of our popular fonts. In 19971998 we produced some decorative fonts and a series of fonts based on the designs of Gill Sans and Helvetica Neue. At the end of 1998 we decided it was no longer beneficial to produce font clones. Instead, we decided to maintain and improving our existing fonts, concentrating on adding better hinting and producing better TrueType versions. In 1996, Microsoft released Core fonts ...Read More