January 21, 2015
My name is Dieter Steffmann. I am a trained typesetter and stopped practicing my profession in 1966. Two decades later in 1986 I bought a Commodore Amiga 2000 with 6 MB of RAM, a 50MB SCSI hard drive and a multi-tasking operating system. That might seem like a "toy computer" from today's perspective, but back then an MS-DOS computer had a maximum of 640KB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive; No multitasking, no sound, no 4096 colors. The operating system of the Amiga fit on 4 disks - and the very detailed manual contained about 500 pages in a slipcase.
The Amiga had a graphical user interface ("Workbench") with mouse control, and to that day PC users had to enter commands with the keyboard and their monitor could merely displayed up to 16 colors. by the way, the disks for the Amiga were already in 3.5-inch format. In 1987 a very professional desktop publishing program from St. Louis called "Page Stream" came to life, which was already capable of WYSIWYG: Price $130. The Amiga operating system already made use of vector fonts from Agfa ("intelli") and it also worked with Adobe PostScript fonts. A diskette with 4 fonts cost about $100 and if at all was only available in big city department stores.
On the other hand, there were public domain PostScript fonts already available in mailboxes at that time (TrueType fonts were still unknown), but these usually did not posses German umlauts. It was only logical that I would extend these public domain fonts with the full character set. All this happened on the Amiga and the corresponding font editing program was called "font designer" (the further development of "Type Smith"), which was not available in Germany nor in the German language.
Around 1993/94 Commodore was history and I had to "downgrade" to a Windows machine. I had to convert my numerous fonts from the Amiga or from the Mac-format to the Windows platform, So that I could further use them. To outsiders this task sounds easier than it actually was. I have been practicing my hobby for over 25 years and my skills have inevitably expanded and improved. For several years, I have completed not only erroneous public domain fonts, but I have digitized or vectorized complete fonts. Nowadays, even high-quality fonts are available and affordable for everyone. Therefore, I have specialized in collecting and digitizing "blackletter" (Fraktur) fonts, which have no market value to large font houses because of insufficient demand, and are therefore generally not available for purchase.
Since I consider fonts to be cultural heritage, I do not agree with their commercialization. Fonts once made out of metal type obviously had a price along with their metal value, and the cost of designing, cutting and casting is convincing, particularly since the buyer also acquired ownership of the purchased fonts!
Anyone who believes that they can buy a magazine now a days and then have the property acquired as in the times of metal setting, is wrong: The font foundries only sell "licenses" for a file of nothing but "zeros and ones" with no real material value, and the buyer usually does not become the owner, but only a licensee!
For all these reasons I am giving out my fonts to everyone for free for commercial purposes without any restrictions and I hope you enjoy in these fonts as much as I and many other font-friends around the world do!
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