The Fall and Rise of Luc Devroye’s Link Site

Well-known online resource is down, then back up again.

On 26 April 2006, user Altan Orhon posted the followning message to the discussion boards on the Typophile.com website:

Luc Devroye may not be known to the world at large, but to online typeophiles, he’s a bookmark. His old website, http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/, a sprawling collection of pages about type, typographers, free fonts and utilities that seemed to go on forever. Spare and undecorated, they also contained opinion and writings of his stated specialty (It was there that I found out about the free font editing utility FontForge, as well as all the big ones, past and present).

The demise of his site caught many by surprise and left a more than a few with dismay. Reading the commentary on Typophile one quickly gets the idea that while the conventional wisdom acknoweldged his pages use as a resource there is rather much controversy about his writings and positions on various issues on typography and intellectual property.

Removed to New Address

Originally it was assumed that various unnamed commercial interests that he had presumably upset with a penchant for thorny opinions had forced his site offline, but the actual reason was much more pragmatic: nude pictures. Via Typographica:

By later that day, it developed that news of his site’s demise had been exaggerated, and was back up on the net, supported by Carleton University at http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/. The type pages are reached by links on the third line of the paragraph headed “Research”, and it it said that all pages were back up and accessable with the exception of the free fonts lists.