Open Fonts For The Web -- Harder Than It Sounds

simpl3x writes "of the nytimes articles posted today, this one about new, open fonts designed for the web was by far the most interesting. Here is a link to the project site, and here is a reason why it is necessary. For all the talk of the world wide part, the basics are still very local, aren't they? It will be interesting to see how one chooses a character on a keyboard!"

Comments

Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, we can't even get a stand for HTML, and now we're going to try to get fancy fonts a standard?

Math fonts.

[DarkHelmet]

You had to use math fonts as an example of why this is necessary...

What about wingdings, you elitist pig?

</humor>

Re:Font specifications

[Pfhreakaz0id]

this works until your corporate officers are visiting someone at another company and says "well, just pull up our website. It's on there" and sees that (god forbid) it looks DIFFERENT (because he has raised his font size, has a different resolution) and comes screams at the IT department that the web site isn't following corporate look and feel standards.

That's why, in many large companies, the web site is COMPLETELY under the domain of the marketing department. IT/MIS has absolutely nothing to say about it.

This is a fact of business life.

The least of our worries

[ekrout]

There are many things that I worry regarding the Web, but support for CmdrTacoScribble02.ttf is the least of our worries.

With large corporations comes a lot of money, which we all know can influence nearly anyone to change their views. Microsoft has near dominance with their Windows + x86 platform and has been trying to change the Web from an open standards-based database of all the information in the World into yet-another-slice-of-the-computing-pie, right next their gigantic slices of Windows and Office.

So I humbly ask that designers and advocates of the my-font-anywhere revolution talked about in this article don't forget about keeping standards open for all of the Web. This includes not only fonts, but more important subsects such as Web servers, scripting languages, databases, XML, etc.

Re:Font specifications

[WatertonMan]

The problem is that the separation between form and content isn't as clear as many pretend. Take the obvious example, albeit one not that common any more. Back in the day when there were many different used word processing formats things came up differently. Perhaps the words (the content) were more or less the same. However if tables and so forth came out differently then the content really wasn't the same because of the problem of getting the original content into a form you could read.

Put in more simple terms - content is only content when it can be discerned as such. Perhaps someone speaking Russian to you is saying something useful. But if you don't speak Russian, it does you know good.

The big problem from day one with the world wide web was assuming that a very simple display engine was sufficient. This was naive and in part led to all that fracturing of the market that enabled Microsoft to take it over. Yes CSS helps a bit (although it came rather late). However the problem of fonts is still a big one that has not, in my opinion, been adequately solved.

Admittedly it is one that is more of a problem for people in academics. (i.e. physics and mathematics) And for web display most of these people simply convert their equations to GIFs or (more commonly now) simply keep everything in PDF. While Adobe tried to leverage their Acrobat product as an alternative to many web standards, the fact is that PDFs have many limits.

And of course there is still that problem of generating PDFs. This being Slashdot and all, I'm sure that all the TeX fans will come out of the woodwork. However for regular users it is often less than helpful. Even the equation editor in Word, while helpful, isn't the ideal solution in my opinion.

Unfortunately, given that the number of people who write equations is such a small niche, I don't think we'll see this solved in a nice fashion. And, to be fair, things today are VASTLY superior to how things were back in the days of typewriters.

Re:Pah, forget these ''math'' fonts...

[panaceaa]

Your fonts are nice. Do you ever consider making more corporate or professional looking fonts? I find that there are lots of people like you creating off-the-wall goofy fonts, which is great (it's art!), but not very usable. Would it be too boring to make more traditional fonts? You can add lots of attitude and feel to your fonts and still have them be usable in papers and in more conservative outlets.

Re:The 5 Linux fonts

[Trepidity]

I don't think it's actually possible to learn how to configure X properly. There's about 5 different "standard" ways of setting up fonts in X, and the details change with every revision. To make matters worse, many of the important ones (like Xft) are poorly documented.