Arphic Technology Co., Ltd. (, aka.: Arphic Technology (文鼎科技)) is a

type foundry A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Mono ...

based in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

(

Republic of China Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northeast ...

), founded in May 1990.

Fonts

Arphic PL Fonts

Arphic Technology is the creator of the Arphic PL Fonts (where "PL" means "public license(d)", in Chinese: 文鼎公眾授權字型 or 文鼎自由字型), including AR PL

Kaiti Regular script (; Hepburn: ''kaisho''), also called (), (''zhēnshū''), (''kǎitǐ'') and (''zhèngshū''), is the newest of the Chinese script styles (popularized from the Cao Wei dynasty c. 200 AD and maturing stylistically around the ...

Big5 Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character set inst ...

(文鼎 PL 中楷), AR PL Mingti2L Big5 (文鼎 PL 細上海宋), AR PL SungtiL GB (文鼎 PL 簡報宋) and AR PL KaitiM GB (文鼎 PL 簡中楷), which were released in 1999 under the Arphic Public License. They are used by

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

-derived

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s (such as

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

), as well as by most

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

distributions, as part of their default

CJK font This is a list of notable CJK fonts (computer fonts which contain a large range of Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters). These fonts are primarily sorted by their typeface, the main classes being "with serif", "without serif" and "script". In thi ...

s. In 2010, Arphic Technology released another two fonts, AR PL MingU20-L (文鼎 PL 明體) and AR PL BaoSong2 GBK (文鼎 PL 報宋), which are available under a revised Arphic Public License that restricts distribution of the fonts to non-profit use only.

Meiryo

As a partner of C&G Inc., Arphic Technology was one of the designers of

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

in C&G's

Meiryo is a Japanese sans-serif gothic typeface. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces MS Gothic as the default system font for Vista on Japanese systems. Meiryo was created out of a growing ne ...

(明瞭) font, intended for Japanese.

Arphic Public License

The "Arphic Public License" published by Arphic Technology in 1999 was recognized by

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

as a

copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...

, free

software license A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source ...

and incompatible with the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

. But as it is used almost only for fonts, the incompatibility does not cause a problem in that use. The revised Arphic Public License published in 2010 doesn't allow commercial use, thus is non-free.

References

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External links