Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts?

dotne writes "Microsoft has submitted Embedded OpenType (EOT) to W3C and a slimy campaign for EOT has been launched. EOT is a DRM layer on top of normal TrueType/Opentype files; EOT ties a font file to a certain web page or site and prevents reuse by other pages/sites. Microsoft's IE has supported EOT for years, but it has largely been ignored due to the clumsiness of having to regenerate font files when a page changes. Now that other browsers are moving to support normal TrueType and OpenType on the web (Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Prince), W3C is faced with a question: should they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"

Comments

Re:Linux users install MS fonts???

[amorsen]

I always found truetype fonts sucked period, and the adobe type1 fonts seemed to render better, especially when printed.

From a technical viewpoint, today, there is very little to distinguish the formats. TrueType only does quadratic Bezier curves where Type 1 does cubic, but it is trivial to interpolate cubic curves with quadratic ones, at a slight cost in code size.

When you buy fonts, the higher-quality fonts tend to be in the Type 1 format, but that is for historical reasons.

Re:Loaded question

[Hatta]

You only need 3 fonts. A serif, a san-serif, and a fixed width. For English at least.

Re:Loaded question

[QuoteMstr]

And then there's stuff like medieval transcriptions. How can I post a good transcription of a Middle English romance without the characters thorn, eth, yogh, and wynn? Some of those are available in standard fonts, especially thorn and eth, but yogh and wynn are a lot harder to come by

You're doing it wrong. Both yogh and wynn have unicode code points. They work just fine here.

Beware of trademarks

[PRMan]

Don't use the same name, they're usually Trademarked.

And if you copied 100% of the size hinting, they would claim you were copying the program portion.

But, in essence, yes.