🚀 go-pugleaf

the underlying problem of typefaces and their names is protection.
as most of you will know (i hope), typefaces are not protected under
copyright in the US, but well in other parts of the world, like europe.
the legal status is very different from country to country. however,
where the type itself may not be protected in the US, its name may be.
for instance, `Zapf Chancery' is a trademark of ITC.

now the story of the ubiquous Helvetica: the type was designed 1957
by the Swiss designer Max Miedinger for the Haas foundry and licenced
to a number of other manufacturers of phototypesetting equipment.
It's main distinction is compactness, as you get relatively much text
within a given area. It became rather popular, particular in the US.
As Helvetica became to many people a generic term for a sens serif font,
there was a need to provide such font in all kinds of environments for
what we now call DTP. A real Helvetica would have cost royalties, and there
was no suitable marketing channel for fonts at that time. the easiest way
out under ruling law was to put out a font which `smelled the same' but
with a name suggesting the origin. The name `Helvetica' was protected by
trademark, but the type design itself not. thus we got `Geneva' and `Swiss'.
When Linotype licenced a bunch of fonts to Adobe, and the Laserwriter
hit the market, there was a way to provide a real Helvetica font to the
masses by bundling it in the purchase price of that machine. so we now
have both the original and the lookalike floating around in the DTP world.

another well known sens serif design is that age by a Swiss designer is
Univers by Adrian Frutiger. many, including me, rate it superior to
Helvetica, but Univers is not much known in North America. Univers is not
a single font, but family in various weights and shapes according to an
underlying construction scheme; Univers 55 may be the best known one.
look at it, if don't know it yet.

the bottomm line: a sad story for the type designer who has to live
from royalties. on the other hand, we all like to have a good collection
of fonts readily available. If international law would provide a
reasonable platform for font marketing on a wide scale, we would all profit.

Karl Kleine