Why is a font named Trebuchet?

[Sonia_Montdore]

Why is there a font called Trebuchet? What do a siege engine and a typeface have in common?

[The_Octagon]

Somebody thought it sounded cool.

Seriously.

Trebuchet’s name originated from a lunch conversation with someone from my type group. An engineer told a story about a question posted to an internal puzzle email list. The question was “can you make a Trebuchet that could launch a person from main campus to the new consumer campus about a mile away? Mathematically is it possible and how?” The word Trebuchet is defined as a medieval engine that launches missiles. I thought that would be a great name for a font that launches words across the Internet. I was almost finished with the family and really needed a name soon. This was perfect.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/trebuche/default.htm

[Sonia_Montdore]

Thank you, Octagon. That’s a very interesting link.

[gotpasswords]

A real enough reason perhaps, but still a bit fanciful. The real truth is that it’s fairly hard to copyright a typeface and have that stick (Other than the US Patent and Trademark office, and professional typographers, who know the difference between Arial and Helvetica?), but it’s comparatively a lot easier to copyright the face’s name.

No more fanciful a method than how we wind up with typefaces named after pastries, cities or vagrants.

Croissant is a sort of puffy rounded face that apparently looks like it was made out of those pastries.

Around 15 years ago, a Mac came with a handful of system fonts named after cities. Chicago was the default font (and still lives on as the face used on iPods) and San Francisco was a wacky one useful only for composing ransom notes.

No idea who came up with the face known as Hobo.

[Acsenray]

@gotpasswords

The real truth is that it’s fairly hard to copyright a typeface and have that stick (Other than the US Patent and Trademark office, and professional typographers, who know the difference between Arial and Helvetica?)

What exactly are you trying to say here? Original typeface designs **are **subject to copyright law. The Patent and Trademark Office does not deal with copyrights.

, but it’s comparatively a lot easier to copyright the face’s name.

No, it’s impossible to copyright the name of anything. Names, titles, and short phrases are not protected under copyright law.

Names of typefaces may, however, be trademarked. Which is under the aegis of the PTO.

So do you care to rephrase your comment? Because the way it’s stated, I don’t understand what you’re getting act.