It's exciting to see that a new Hofstadter book is out!
With respect to bringing beauty into the world in dark times, it's always worth remembering Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, "Leningrad", composed in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis, and first performed there later that year, with some of the musicians fainting from starvation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOkBEqtGUI8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Shostakovich)
I think I may have been the first person to see some of these fonts in 20 years. But, apparently, there were hundreds more. I have a vague memory that maybe they were lost in a disk crash.
Letterforms aren't copyrightable under US law, where the file in question was initially published, but outline font files are because they are "computer programs". Gridfont letters are 56-bit bitmaps indicating which segments are turned on or off, which to me are obviously not computer programs. Nobody that I know of has ever litigated over letterforms like these:
font : benzene right
creator : doug
create date : Tue Feb 19 15:39:48 EST 1991
last edit : feb 24 94
a 058002400B0000
b 04824B00090000
c 04800100090000
so I don't think their copyright status has ever been decided. So, if you decide to use these in your product logo or something, there's no guarantee you won't lose a lawsuit to Hofstadter (or his estate, or Indiana University). Don't say I didn't warn you.
That said, that wasn't the motivation for creating them, so I think the risk is fairly small.
Another Doug Hofstadter book! This is so cool. Ambigrams have been one of my fav "things" since I saw them in the GEB book ages ago.
FWIW, "Angels and Demons" bestseller thriller (?) has a few ambigram puzzles that the protagonist Robert Langdon solves to get to the mystery of the Rosslyn chapel (my memory may be fading here)
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Thanks for this set of amazing fonts! They look amazing. Very glyph-y. And they tickle my inner geek.
With respect to bringing beauty into the world in dark times, it's always worth remembering Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, "Leningrad", composed in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis, and first performed there later that year, with some of the musicians fainting from starvation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOkBEqtGUI8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Shostakovich)
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In case there are other Hofstadter letterform fans here, last year I tracked down the "gridfonts" repository his research group had put together as part of their work on "letter spirit" last millennium, at https://wayback.archive-it.org/219/20060606215909/http://www.... There were 287 gridfonts in it. I reverse-engineered the file format (before finding the Scheme code that decoded it), hacked together a Python 3 script http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gridfontparse.py to convert it to PostScript, and produced this PDF with all the gridfonts: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/all-gridfonts.pdf
I think I may have been the first person to see some of these fonts in 20 years. But, apparently, there were hundreds more. I have a vague memory that maybe they were lost in a disk crash.
Letterforms aren't copyrightable under US law, where the file in question was initially published, but outline font files are because they are "computer programs". Gridfont letters are 56-bit bitmaps indicating which segments are turned on or off, which to me are obviously not computer programs. Nobody that I know of has ever litigated over letterforms like these:
so I don't think their copyright status has ever been decided. So, if you decide to use these in your product logo or something, there's no guarantee you won't lose a lawsuit to Hofstadter (or his estate, or Indiana University). Don't say I didn't warn you.That said, that wasn't the motivation for creating them, so I think the risk is fairly small.