1Mostly-free OCR B 2 3This font is used in UPC bar code symbols, including the ISBN symbols on 4most published books. 5 6A freely distributable version seems to be sorely needed. Until now, it's 7been very difficult to find the font in computer-usable format except by 8paying a high fee to a commercial font vendor. Even many serious commercial 9publishers have so much trouble getting it right that they just go ahead and 10use Helvetica instead, or even (shudder) Arial. Since the OCR B font is 11required by an international standard, it seems like it ought to be free. 12So here it is. The font in this package is not a "ripped", pirated, or 13shadily reverse engineered version; every effort has been made to ensure 14that it genuinely derives from free sources and all the creators involved 15have actually intended it for free public use. 16 17Converted by Matthew Skala from Metafont format to Postscript and TrueType 18formats, July 28, 2006, using mftrace 1.2.4 by Paul Vojta, which is 19available from 20 http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/ 21and Autotrace 0.31.1 available from 22 http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ 23 24The Metafont files (not included - see notes below) were coded by Norbert 25Schwarz in the 1980s, based on German standards documents. He has attached 26a notice, notably not actually claiming any copyright - see the file 27"ocrbinfo" - saying that the fonts are "given to free non commercial use", 28but commenting that he is only free to grant rights to his own work on the 29digitization, because he did not design the original letter forms. He 30suggests that there may be other copyright claims attached to the letter 31forms themselves, which Schwarz credits as being originally designed by 32"Adam Frutiger" [sic], almost certainly a mistake for Adrian Frutiger. My 33(Matthew Skala's) understanding of copyright law, at least in the USA and 34Canada, is that in fact typefaces per se cannot be subject to copyright 35claims, so the software embodiment is the only thing subject to copyright 36and Schwarz's release makes it available for whatever "non commercial use" 37means. 38 39To avoid muddying the waters further, any copyright claims by Matthew Skala 40on these files are hereby released to the public domain. I'd like for these 41fonts to be freely usable even in marginally commercial applications, such 42as to generate UPC labels for books that will be sold for profit, but it may 43not be within my power to grant that myself because I didn't write the 44Metafont files although I did do considerable, and probably copyrightable, 45work on the translation to Postscript and TrueType. It was *not* a purely 46automated process; try using the tools I used and see how far you get 47without human editing! I'd also like for these fonts (the fonts themselves 48as opposed to documents made with them) not to be sold, not even indirectly 49by those Web sites that advertise "free downloads" but make it difficult to 50actually download fonts without paying a fee. 51 52NOTE: This ZIP archive is a stripped-down version containing just the 53essential files for using the main OCR B font on most systems. If you want 54the much larger complete package, which contains Metafont sources and several 55variant fonts (reverse-video, outline, and slanted), look for a ZIP archive 56called ocrb-complete.zip wherever you found this one. 57 58Matthew Skala 59mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca 60http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ 61