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OPTI Fonts by Castcraft Software

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I have a collection of fonts from OPTI Fonts by Castcraft Software that I purchased in the late 1980s or early 90s. I can't find the receipt or the original 3.5 hard disks. Its been close to 30 years. Its been over 25 years since I had a floppy or 3.5 hard disk drive. It appears the company no longer exists. Can I still use these fonts if I cannot demonstrate I have a license.? I am trying sort out my font collection. 

  • Author

I was not aware these fonts were pirated. Were they copies of typositer fonts or copied from old specimen books?

Castcraft was notorious for pirating Typositor film fonts back in the seventies. They contact-printed fonts originating from other producers, changing only the name. I saw one of their catalogs around 1980 and it was a ring binder about 2 inches thick, with five or six fonts shown on each page. You could get practically anything from them. I recall noticing that in some fonts, there were characters upside down or backwards. Producers of fonts would do this deliberately on a single copy of a font to be sent to a type house in order to see where the pirated versions were coming from. The OPTI Fonts collection was drawn from Castcraft's vast collection of pirated film fonts.

  • Author

OK. I will not use them. I have not used an OPTI font since the 1990s anyway. On a side note: I had a part time job when in design school setting headlines for a magazine using a typositor. That was in 1981-1982. The art directors liked insanely tight letter spacing. You could overlap letters with that device. 

Thanks for the info!

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