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

Loaded question

[celardore]

"Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"

Gee, I wonder what /. will think...

Re:Loaded question

[AltGrendel]

60% will think "That depends on how much money Microsoft throws at the W3C.
35% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
4% will think "Microsoft should do whatever it pleases, nothing has stopped it from doing that anyway."

The remaining 1% will be various trolls and flamebait.

Re:Loaded question

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem a little bit confused. Here, let me help you.

1% will think "That depends on how much money Microsoft throws at the W3C.
4% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
35% will think "Microsoft should do whatever it pleases, nothing has stopped it from doing that anyway."
The remaining 60% will be various trolls and flamebait.

Re:Loaded question

[argent]

5% will think "That depends on how much money Microsoft spends to pack voting bodies with sock puppets."
10% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
50% will think "Microsoft will do whatever it wants anyway."
90% will be various trolls and flamebait.

Disclaimer: totals do not add to 100% because some contestants qualify for more than one category. Contents may have settled in shipping. 186,000 miles a second.... it's not just a good idea, it's the law. No animals were harmed in testing this product. Fnord.

Re:Loaded question

[Gyga]

What if I want a fancy title without using an image that screws over scalability (fluid layouts FTW) and screen reading software? Sane font usage could be good for design purposes.

Of course we need options/extensions to over ride fonts when the Myspace-Unreadability-Guild (TM) figures out that black on black in weird grunge font looks good.

Re:Loaded question

[Foofoobar]

Allow me to be the aberration that only responds with a non-sequitor...
I WANT ICE CREAMSHOE LACES!!!

Re:Loaded question

[X0563511]

I don't want your fancy font! If my browser wants to use foo-font regular, point 10, I want it to be able to.

If you are more worried over presentation, HTML may not be the media for you.

Re:Loaded question

[Anonymous Coward]

Use sIFR? Uses flash but has decent failover in the event the Flash doesn't show up/gets munged.

Re:Loaded question

[Malevolyn]

Oh no, your post contains valid content discussing a matter at hand, as does mine. GP has... no basis in anything whatsoever related to... well, anything. You said it a lot better than I did.

Re:Loaded question

[InlawBiker]

I'll show you. I'm going to make tiny .png's of each letter and lay them out as images.

Re:Loaded question

[Gyga]

So over ride it (within a week of any sort of font whatever being implemented in Firefox there will be an extension), designers still should be able to design something. Heck this way you would get text that can be adjusted by your browser instead of an image.

Re:Loaded question

[mysqlrocks]

While I agree with you in theory, I don't think you're considering the practicality here. Many web designers come from the print world where they _do_ have total control over presentation. Yes, they need to learn about separating structure and presentation. But, we should do everything we can to encourage them to design "correctly." I think the GPs point was that letting designer's pick a specific font is better than them deciding to use an image instead of text - he was offering up a compromise. Now, whether or not I agree is a whole other question ;-)

Re:Loaded question

[Firehed]

And web design may not be for you. Set your damn user style sheet and it'll override whatever attractive layout the designer provided for you with whatever ugly font you want.

I'm not a designer, but let's stop pretending it's 1995.

Re:Loaded question

[MarkKB]

"Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?" Gee, I wonder what /. will think...

It's interesting to note that the linked page has absolutely nothing to do with EOT; rather, it refers to Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web.

Besides, this is quite old news - I certainly knew about it several months ago, and the submission website says it was submitted in March, over five months ago.

Re:Loaded question

[Reality Master 101]

Use font-family, do NOT specify a font for me. I, or my browser, will choose the font.

My page, my design. But feel free to use a browser that does anything you want to the pages you want to display. But the vast majority of the rest of the world likes visiting well-designed pages.

Re:Loaded question

[X0563511]

A well designed page has no care for the specific font that is used, only the style of font and size.

Re:Loaded question

[Lord_Sintra]

Would that include SQL injection/XSS?

Re:Loaded question

[Chaos Incarnate]

For most content, certainly. But with things like corporate logos, if the choice is between a specified font or an image file, which would you, the end user, rather the designer chose?

Re:Loaded question

[Reality Master 101]

A well designed page has no care for the specific font that is used, only the style of font and size.

No, that's a particular *design option* that may or may not be important to the design specification. In certain other cases, it's important to exercise tight control of the maximum width of some text, and that requires specifying the font. For example, I might have a news site with a headline box, and I want each headline to fit on one line without line-breaking and making it look crappy (with a bunch of lines with a single word on each second line). Now, if someone chooses to change the fonts, then it degenerates the way it degenerates. But for most of the world, it will look like a clean, polished design.

And no, not every page needs to be auto-sizing to the width of the browser... that's also a design option that may or may not be appropriate for every design.

Unfortunately, too many people think that the whole concept of "the HTML dictates the content, and the browser dictates the look" from the far past is somehow carved in stone tablets given by God. It's not. The point of a browser is to communicate with a web site, and there are a lot of different ways to do that.

Re:Loaded question

[skeeto]

I think the GPs point was that letting designer's pick a specific font is better than them deciding to use an image instead of text

Which is why most images (at least at some point) on the web contain only text. This is obvious if you ever used or were victim to the infamous Webcollage screensaver (the "porn screensaver"), which displayed randomly selected images from the web. You get a screen full of random text and porn. Not a good impression to leave for your new college roommate when you leave for class right after your fresh RH9 install.

Re:Loaded question

[raynet]

Unfortunately you cannot do that even if you could embed a font, different browsers and operating systems render fonts slightly differently which will cause the text to be too wide in some cases. If you really need to create such a textbox please use images or Flash, preferrably make a design that can handle variable sized contents. I might be biased, but I need to do webdesign for Finnish and have to live with words like 'sarjakuvafestivaaleilla' which wont wrap nicely into 50pix wide columns.

Re:Loaded question

[nebulus4]

You don't need any extensions. Just go to Tools -> Options (or Edit -> Preferences) -> Content, Fonts & Colors -> Advanced and uncheck 'Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above'.

Re:Loaded question

[nbert]

I think gp was talking about things like banners or company logos. There it really makes sense, because the current solution is to use images. And since many people believe that the company's name should also carry a h1 tag (for SEO and accessibility) they use one of the hacks which resizes the h1 text to 1px and put the image next to it.

One very small company I work for simply has its name in Bangle on a blue background. Since only few people have it on their computer and since it's not free I have to create lots of images for something which simply is a font on a colored background. Not that it takes me so much time, but from a aesthetical point of view it's really unsatisfying*.
Since it's just a logo representing an image I don't think anyone would take offense. It would also help to fight Flash, because it would make it easier to give a website a certain look without going this road. However, when it comes to continuous text in Comic Sans I totally agree with you. *Of course it would only work if you could also specify that you don't want it to be resized by the browser, but in my case I don't even care about that because it's just in a bar on top of everything else, so it would grow along.

Re:Loaded question

[Mathinker]

I'm probably out of my depths, here, but anyway...

> What if I want a fancy title without using an image that screws over scalability
> (fluid layouts FTW) and screen reading software?

Wouldn't an SVG graphic + ALT text handle this?

Re:Loaded question

[jorgevillalobos]

If you are worried over accessibility, HTML may not be the media for you.

Right, who cares about accessibility in the World Wide Web anyway?

FFS...

Re:Loaded question

[Selanit]

You don't need to be a print designer to want more fonts. The list of "safe" fonts that can be expected to work reliably in most web browsers includes:

Arial
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS
Courier New
Georgia
Impact
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana

That's it. NINE fonts for BILLIONS of web sites.

I'm not a print designer. But I make lots of web pages, and damn it, nine fonts is not enough. Typography is the single most powerful and versatile design tool in existence. You can use it to convey emotion, to highlight important bits of a page, to subtly improve reading comprehensibility, and on and on.

Not to mention the specialty uses. Have you ever tried to transliterate Egyptian hieroglyphs on the web? I have, and I had to go the sIFR route to represent characters which are just not available, such as the character shaped like a 3 representing a palatal A sound.

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 can get them using Junicode, but only if your visitor happens to have that particular font installed, which 99.99999% of people do not. sIFR isn't really a solution in that case, because you only need four damn characters, repeated at intervals throughout a fairly lengthy text.

But hey, 640K should be enough for anyone!

Re:Loaded question

[Anonymous Coward]

You get a screen full of random text and porn. Not a good impression to leave for your new college roommate

I hated text in college too.

Re:Loaded question

[bill_mcgonigle]

Unfortunately, too many people think that the whole concept of "the HTML dictates the content, and the browser dictates the look" from the far past is somehow carved in stone tablets given by God. It's not. The point of a browser is to communicate with a web site, and there are a lot of different ways to do that.

Right, the point of the web is communication. Anything that hinders communication is antithetical.

I'm all for lovely design, don't get me wrong, but PDF is a better language to describe layout than HTML and CSS.

Re:Loaded question

[Blakey Rat]

I think the majority of responses will be:

"Why do I need all these flashy fonts on the web anyway! I have my browser show every website in Courier 10, and daggummit, that's the way every site should be! Back when I was a kid we didn't have none of these fancy fonts and we were all happier. Websites with Flash on them are basically Satan!!! GET OFF MY LAWN!"

Re:Loaded question

[daradib]

If you really need to create such a textbox please use images or Flash

Please not Flash. I know websites that use Flash for every single headline (with about a dozen headlines in a page, or more), when they could easily use an image or even text. This slows down the rendering of the page (or at least makes the rendering process awkward) and is especially ugly for people who don't happen to have Adobe Flash Plugin 9.0.124.0 installed or block it (i.e. FlashBlock).

Re:Loaded question

[roca]

One option is (will be) to convert your font to an SVG font. Then you get precisely predictable spacing and rasterization.

Re:Loaded question

[TheRaven64]

In certain other cases, it's important to exercise tight control of the maximum width of some text, and that requires specifying the font

It also requires specifying the kerning and the layout algorithm, so I hope you don't mind using a little bit of JavaScript on the canvas tag and drawing the beziers yourself. I also hope you remember that the web is a resolution-independent medium and specify your sizes in something other than pixels, and remember that 1pt is not equal to 1px unless your screen DPI happens to be 72.

Re:Loaded question

[riceboy50]

If you are worried over semantics, HTML may not be the media for you.
If you are worried over accessibility, HTML may not be the media for you.

Where did you come up with this? The main focus of web standards in the last 5+ years has been making the markup more semantic and more accessible—hell, that's one of the main purposes of CSS. Now please leave the web design profession.

Re:Loaded question

[kvezach]

You forgot the 0.1% that'll say "Oh goody, another challenge! I'll fire up IDA right away".

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

[e2d2]

No no no, the web is all about usability!.. To the point that it becomes boring as shit.

Re:Loaded question

[CaptSaltyJack]

I'm not a print designer.

Didn't think so. Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need. Arial is a semi-clone of Helvetica, it's a good sans-serif font. Times New Roman will have you covered for serif. Georgia and Verdana are slightly off the beaten path for serif and sans-serif, respectively. I wouldn't WANT anything else used as the primary font. Imagine having to read paragraphs of crap using FancySwirlyCrap.ttf, because some designer thought it was cool. Ugh, no f'ing thanks.

I say no. Keep the web legible. Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.

Re:Loaded question

[X0563511]

An image. It's a logo, like a letterhead. It needs to look exactly like how you want it - you cannot leave it as text and expect that.

Maybe once SVG becomes widely supported, that will be a better option, but for now - image or nothing, thanks.

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.

Re:Loaded question

[PitaBred]

If only we had some kind of Scalable Vector Graphic that would allow us to do logos and such, that was a W3C standard... ahhh, but to dream.

Why don't we worry about supporting existing standards, instead of making new ones that are useless?

Re:Loaded question

[Selanit]

Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need.

SARCASM
Ah! That explains why word processing software like MS Word, OpenOffice.org and AbiWord only offer those same nine fonts, and there is no more advanced print design software. The next time I see Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign running, I'll be sure to treat them as the hallucinations they are. Thanks for clearing up those mysteries. END SARCASM

I direct your attention to the following:

1) The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird. He has formal graphic design training, wrote a book on the topic, and does not appreciate having his options limited to nine fonts.
2) The Non-Designer's Design Book and The Non-Designer's Typography Book, both by Robin Williams. She's not only a trained graphic designer who has written several books on the topic, but one who works primarily in print. She loves her typography, and really hates the limited nature of fonts on the web (see The Non-Designer's Web Design Book for that).

I wouldn't WANT anything else used as the primary font. Imagine having to read paragraphs of crap using FancySwirlyCrap.ttf, because some designer thought it was cool. Ugh, no f'ing thanks.

Sure. People will make crappy web pages with crappy designs that hurt your eyes. Guess what? They already do. I'd tell you to go browse MySpace for a couple hours, but I'm not that cruel.

Meanwhile, the good designers who know what they're doing are crippled.

Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.

The list is that way because of Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web program, initiated in 1996. The basic aim of the program was to give web designers some kind of consistent control over the typography in their sites -- prior to that time, you just had to pick a font and take your chances.

Readability was one consideration in the list of fonts they settled on, sure. But the basic aim was to improve designer's control over the default fonts. It achieved that goal well. And now it's time to move on.

Happily, it looks to me as though this is going to happen, regardless of whether everyone likes it or not. I'm sure they'll give you a configuration setting to turn off web fonts, though, so you can go on reading Times New Roman and Arial until the end of your days if you'd like.

Re:Loaded question

[IntlHarvester]

One trick I've seen is a JavaScript/Flash applet combo which automatically replaces all the H1s and H2s with headings in the company font.

This creates titles which have the corporate look, but doesn't require a bunch of photoshopping and doesn't break accessbility. Furthermore if the web taliban doesn't like it, they can easily block it.

Re:Loaded question

[Toonol]

I think a well-designed web page should have the ability to have any common html elements pointed to a different CSS definition, and still render reasonably. That's a feature; if changing a font breaks your page, you are designing web pages that are like a BASIC program full of GOTOs.

Re:Loaded question

[grumbel]

The problem is that a lot of webpages break when you change the font, text boxes will overflow, menubars will no longer fit and all kind of misery will result. To bad that Firefox doesn't have a button to fix those issues, since overflowing textboxes really don't look like a thing that should ever happen, no matter how crappy a webpage might be.

Re:Loaded question

[Nullav]

screen reading software

If only we could set some sort of alternative text attribute for images. W3C should really get on that.

Re:Loaded question

[nbert]

I do believe that we need a standard which makes pictures and text resolution independent. IMO CSS has failed in so many regards I'm starting to wonder why tables were so bad at all. Of course it has advantages to keep design and content separate, but that rarely happens in the real world. Another argument for CSS was that it was more accessible. I'm not blind, so I can't tell how much websites have improved. But when I look at the source of sites like cnet.com I'm not really sure they have improved that much in this regard. However, what makes me most angry about the current state is how technical limitations had profound influence on contemporary design. Every site right now has to have a certain width and in case your screen is wider you look at all this space wasted by some background. On my 1440 resolution screen I rarely get more content than on 1024. And if I get it it's just because there is some js aware of my current resolution.

Re:Loaded question

[Chaos Incarnate]

Fair enough—I could see arguments for either way, myself, but your argument is probably going to trump bandwidth concerns at this stage of the Internet's evolution. :)

Re:Loaded question

[oliderid]

A well designed page has no care for the specific font that is used, only the style of font and size.

Errr...Well that is not what communication agencies and multnationals have worked for would say. The font is extremely important and as a web developer (ie programmer) I got my ass regularly kicked because I couldn't see the difference between times new roman, Arial, Verdana and the rest (now I can :-)).

Re:Loaded question

[Jorophose]

Use unicode with a font and system that supports it? UTF-8 supports pretty much every language character set out there.

It supports elvish, FFS.

Re:Loaded question

[DilutedImage]

EXACTLY.

And design aside, this would provide for considerably faster page loads, and greatly reduced bandwidth consumption.

I don't think people get it. EOT would become an OPTION; not a requirement.

Re:Loaded question

[skaet]

Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.

This is exactly right. We don't have multiple competing standards for XHTML do we? Why should our fonts be any different?

The reason the selected fonts are there in the first place is, surprisingly, to keep a minimum standard we can rely on. What will opening up custom fonts allow for the designer that isn't already available? I shouldn't need to be forced to override a custom font I can't read just because the designer felt like being "special."

I'm all for adding new standard fonts but let them go through a strict approval process to ensure they meet legibilty requirements.

Re:Loaded question

[42forty-two42]

It's even more interesting to note that there's actually no DRM in the submitted spec - there's a field (at a fixed location, which you can zero out if you really want to) that gives a machine-readable license statement, and, for some (legacy?) reason, an XOR-by-0x50 cipher, and the option of using subsetting to reduce font sizes at the expense of having to regenerate the font when the website changes. That's it. Nothing else.

Re:Loaded question

[raynet]

Does IE6 support this SVG font thingy? How about Opera? I am really interested since I haven't been able to embed fonts since Netscape 4.x era.

Re:Loaded question

[raynet]

I agree, images is the best way to, but flash might be easier to get nice dynamic text content with anti-alised text with pretty fonts. Best option would be to design the page so that the font and text size wont matter at all.

Re:Loaded question

[SanityInAnarchy]

What if I want a fancy title without using an image that screws over scalability (fluid layouts FTW) and screen reading software?

Won't help scalability, but you can always use semantic HTML (say, an h1 tag), and replace the text with images using CSS.

Re:Loaded question

[msimm]

Gyga,
Maybe what you really want is Flash based sites, or Silverlight. These offer all the same advantages and all the same drawbacks. And even the solution is the same: disable them.

If you're willing to put a proprietary wrapper around your fonts (because after all, someone might steal them!) why limit yourself with just that?

This makes no sense as anything but a potential sales model. And even that only works until they realize that the rasterized image displayed on screen is just a few short clicks from being vectorized.

All DRM based politics aside this is plain stupid.

Re:Loaded question

[daradib]

Just for the record: I was referring to static text headlines, which is absolutely ridiculous as Flash. Static text content in general should never be Flash.

Re:Loaded question

[Gyga]

Are you seriously suggesting Flash? How long did it take for Flash 9 to come to Linux? Not completely accessible.

I never mentioned that I liked to idea of the DRM, I just was saying that the idea of using custom fonts wasn't too bad. I fully understand that this DRM would be crap because the user could probably pull the font file out of their temp folder or something.

Re:Loaded question

[Gyga]

Still doesn't fix the scalability issue with images, I don't want a tiny logo/header on monster screens or a giant logo/header on tiny ones. Pixilation == BAD.

Re:Loaded question

[Mad Merlin]

Pictures and text are already resolution independent, just size in relative units (like ems) instead of absolute units (like px). Try it, it even works with raster images. Vector images would be nice too, but that's not a limitation of CSS, as usual, IE's worthlessness makes everyone suffer.

CSS is actually an excellent standard, both very practical and very powerful. The main problem with CSS actually has nothing to do with CSS and everything to do with IE. The buggy and incomplete implementation of CSS1 (only) in IE6 is still the biggest problem with web design today, as IE6 still has >50% market share in most demographics. However, even with IE's stillborn support of CSS, making pages that degrade gracefully in IE is far from intractable, provided you already know about IE's deficiencies.

Yes, fixed width designs fail miserably, but there's nothing stopping you from making nice liquid designs (Slashdot is a good example) with pure CSS. The reason there's so many fixed width designs around is because there's so many print designers around (and few web designers, in comparison), who by definition expect to have precise control of every last pixel on the screen, whereas web designers know that that's not applicable to the web and design accordingly.

Re:Loaded question

[msimm]

I'm suggesting that wrapping a proprietary drm layer around the TrueType/Opentype container makes about as much sense as using as using Flash or Silverlight.

But in this case you compromise accessibility and gain a proprietary drm layer in order to...use an existing container format on the web.

Why don't we skip the extra layer and support embedded fonts on the web?

I mean it's not like Microsofts DRM pixie-dust can actually stop the fonts from being displayed. Once it's one your screen how many clicks before you can have it vectorized? Opps.

Re:Loaded question

[Raenex]

IMO CSS has failed in so many regards I'm starting to wonder why tables were so bad at all.

The nice thing about CSS is that I can turn it off and text flows nicely. With tables I don't have that option.

Re:Loaded question

[Lennie]

I don't understand why people want word-processors in the first place. They are usually the wrong tool for the job. So they are a poor example of what people need anyway.

Re:Loaded question

[DrSkwid]

Get yourself a better web browser if it bothers you so much.

I force mine to what typeface I want, turn the colours off and fix the font size.

Re:Loaded question

[Gyga]

I never said I supported the DRM crap, I was saying to the OP that fonts by themselves would be good, he doesn't think so.

I bet you would just need to pull the font out of temp files (like youtube videos and anything else you want to rip), so if you have your temp folder book marked it would take, 1 click, highlight, ctrl-c, click to font folder, ctrl-p.

Re:Loaded question

[Skye16]

Don't bother dude, their reading comprehension sucks. You never even alluded to being pro-drm'd fonts, but they're too busy running around with their idiot pants on to take notice.

Re:Loaded question

[JohnBailey]

I don't understand why people want word-processors in the first place. They are usually the wrong tool for the job. So they are a poor example of what people need anyway.

But a very good example of what people do when given a tool, but little general training. They push what they know in new and often undesirable ways. A word processor is not a desktop publishing app, and should never be used as one. And Excel is not a database.

Re:Loaded question

[noctrl]

ah, well, ..

I should have added a smiley there ;)

Quite interesting to watch my comment get moderated as both troll and funny.

Re:Loaded question

[ObiWanKenblowme]

Arial is a piss-poor clone of Helvetica, and is far from being a good typeface. Designers with a formal design background should know that the list above is only standard because it's a list of default fonts installed on Windows for the last 10-15 years - it's a lot more to do with consistency, as opposed to quality, typefaces.

Bad designers are going to find ways of doing bad design whether you give them embedded fonts or not, and embedded fonts won't prevent the web from being legible. If I had to guess, I'd say they'd actually help (if only a little) by allowing designers to not have to do image replacements for headers/menus - that would mean just a bit more separation of content from presentation.

Also, could we please, please as a society agree to never use Comic Sans again for anything? :)

Re:Loaded question

[ObiWanKenblowme]

Don't blame a majority of web publishers'/designers' inability to use CSS properly with a failure of CSS itself - you'd be amazed what knowledgeable, talented people can do with CSS and clean HTML. The problem is, it takes skill (and time) - two things which corporate web designers often lack.

As far as width, CSS really needs some kind of functional column specification. One of the reasons you tend to see fixed-width sites is that a few lines of 1440-pixel-wide text isn't nearly as easy to read as a few more lines of 500-pixel-wide text. Sure, there are other reasons, including lazy designers, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re:Loaded question

[SCHecklerX]

My page, my design. But feel free to use a browser that does anything you want to the pages you want to display. But the vast majority of the rest of the world likes visiting well-designed pages.

That got rated as insightful???

Good luck with that design philosophy as mobile browsing becomes more prevalent. If you 'designers' would do it right, your pages would look good on text-only, small-screen, large-screen, heads-up in cars or glasses, braille, computer-speech-dictation, feeds, page-linkers, and printers alike, without having to create a custom page for each.

Study how this stuff was originally conceived, and then get back to us on that bullshit design arrogance. Good design is elegant and adaptive, not forced.

Re:Loaded question

[Reality Master 101]

Study how this stuff was originally conceived, and then get back to us on that bullshit design arrogance. Good design is elegant and adaptive, not forced.

Talk about arrogance. "There is only one right way to do things, and that's my way!!" Having a page that can adapt to all these various mediums is only one design goal. Unfortunately, a page that can adapt to everything ends up being mediocre everywhere, and excellent nowhere.

Sure, we can produce size 20 clown shoes that fit everybody. How efficient! How elegant! What's that you say? You want a custom fit? You say a shoe that fits your feet exactly works better than the size 20 clown shoe? But surely you don't want us to create a shoe for every foot size. That would be very inefficient.

Of course, your response will be that web pages are more adaptive than shoes, and that's true -- to a point. But the reality is that unless your page is incredibly simple, things just don't end up working well. A custom fit is always going to be better than a one-size-fits-all fit.

Re:Loaded question

[msimm]

Right, but the topic is Microsofts new push to enable DRM'ed fonts using a proprietary layer.

The OP's point that:

If you are more worried over presentation, HTML may not be the media for you

is predictable, myopic and irrelevant. Even without new standards for truly embedded fonts we already support calling non-standard fonts and provide a mechanism to globally override and replace them with standard fonts.

So the only limitation here is the possible breakage by trying to inject a proprietary layer of drm into the standards. Fonts will still be converted and redistributed by those who are inclined to do that, leaving the largest possible effected audience the intended viewers.

Re:Loaded question

[redxxx]

I mean it's not like Microsofts DRM pixie-dust can actually stop the fonts from being displayed. Once it's one your screen how many clicks before you can have it vectorized? Opps.

I think you'd loose hinting. I guess that's ok if you want to use the same point size as the webpage or don't care about it scaling correctly.

Re:Loaded question

[namekuseijin]

"Typography is the single most powerful and versatile design tool in existence."

Oh, please! Fonts are just a way to get a message across. If the message is good, I don't mind it coming from hand-drawn child lettering...

Re:Loaded question

[jc42]

I think the majority of responses will be: "Why do I need all these flashy fonts on the web anyway! I have my browser show every website in Courier 10, ..."

Heh. Do you also force a white-on-green or orange-on-black color scheme?

Actually, those who have minimally explored their browsers' capabilities have noticed that the browsers automatically fall back to a font that they have. (Whether this is a majority of Web users, we really don't know.) After all, you really can't rely on your machine having any particular font. The only sensible thing to do in that case is to pick some other font that your machine does have, and that's what most software does.

What we really should be doing is pointing out publicly that there is no reason whatsoever that anyone should ever install any specific font that some vendor supplies. You should just install the fonts that you like, and which you can read easily. Anything else is a waste of disk space and memory. Those people who insist that their font is the only one to use are violating the basic design goal of the Web, which was that a "page" should be sensibly viewable on whatever output device the user has, and will be formatted to fit that device. And if the user is blind or visually impaired, at least one of the "fonts" should be auditory (for those with hearing) or Braille-like. The web designer's desires don't matter, and neither do the vendor's; all that matters is what works well for the end user.

Pages that don't work that way are simply user-hostile, i.e., wrong.

(I rarely specify a font in any of my web pages. That makes the pages smaller, so they download faster, and they appear in the user's favorite font without any wasted cpu time. The only exceptions are when a boss explicitly orders use of a font, and I like to point out that many users will just override it or won't have the font. But then, I like to be nice to the visually handicapped, even if people are always complaining that my screen's fonts are too small for them to read. ;-)

Re:Loaded question

[jc42]

You're doing it wrong. Both yogh and wynn have unicode code points.

Yup, and they look fine in my firefox window.

So on to the next question: How do I get such non-Latin1 chars printed correctly on a postscript printer? Anyone know of a general solution?

We have a collection of different printers here, and also several OSs (linux, OSX, Windows XP and Vista). All of them tend to produce Latin1 gibberish (aka mojibake) for UTF-8 chars. I've been looking for ways to get text in languages like Arabic and Mandarin printed correctly, so far without notable success. I'd also like to print some Old English at times, too. Anyone know how to do it right?

Re:Loaded question

[jc42]

I'll show you. I'm going to make tiny .png's of each letter and lay them out as images.

Don't laugh too hard. When they first tried to get onto the Internet, that's more or less what the folks in Japan, Korea and China had to do. There are still Asian web sites that work that way. Recently, there has been a slow transition to UTF-8, but 10 years ago, hardly any software supported it. And it's still how a lot of printing software works, since most postscript and PDF printers still only use 8-bit characters internally.

Per-char images also have an advantage that they can be made big enough to legibly contain some of the more complex CJK characters, so they don't turn into a blur when the font size is too small. You can string a bunch of them on a line, and programs that handle images will space the lines to match the tallest chars; even when UTF-8 "works", you often get the chars drawn too small to read.

We still have a long way to go before we support all the world's languages sensibly. It shouldn't be so difficult, of course, since it's just a bunch of glyphs indexed by an integer. But when the organizations building the software are headed by people who are contemptuous of all languages but their own, it can take a very long time to do even the simplest things right.

(Well, except for Arabic-derived scripts, which are the worst case for everything. ;-)

Re:Loaded question

[foniksonik]

My point exactly... Word Documents are much more accessible once you download them... if you're really concerned about accessibility you should maybe think about providing Word versions of all your pages for those who would rather read them in an application that has immense support for assistive devices.

Re:Loaded question

[foniksonik]

And in 5+ years how have the standard bodies done?

I'm not arguing with you over what SHOULD be... I'm just talking about what IS.

And all buildings around the world should be handicap accessible as well... just isn't gonna happen.

Should we also make all the beaches with wheelchair access down to the water?

How about if we mandate that all books be published in Braille? Add in a publishing tax to pay for it....

Why not require that all movies shown in theaters have captions.... wouldn't that be a huge step for the hearing disabled...

speaking of which, does your browser provide optimal support for text to speech and do you put in all the correct CSS for voice emphasis?

Have you even tested your sites using a screenreader? For one thing they all offer different levels of support for pretty much everything and none of them follow the W3C standards.

Have you ever interviewed people who are handicapped? 90% don't even use those things... only the extreme cases do... want to know why?

They don't support flash and 90% of websites can't offer full support for them, so you end up with a limited version of the site.

Basically handicapped people don't want to be treated like second class citizens. That means they don't want YOUR version of the web, they want the version that everybody else gets, with Flash, with RIA, with all the widgets and doodads and cool stuff.

They'd rather get someone to help them than to have to rely on an assistive device being supported.

I think it's a very noble cause you support but at the same time the reality is that handicapped people want to be normal... not treated like special ed kids.

Re:Loaded question

[Nashadelic]

You westerners don't get it. The web is pretty super-optimized for western languages and those 9 fonts that come with every system DON'T do justice to east Asian languages (I'm sure there are more). Times New Roman does not show Urdu in the best way or Pushto for that matter. The browser defaults suck and you can't have a good default for all languages of the world. It would make a world of difference if we could choose a font that is optimized for our language, not for style, for readability. That's something that's hard to implement with the current means.

Re:Loaded question

[X0563511]

Not sure if you are agreeing with me or not. I'm saying, the website should define a font style, leaving the actual font choice up to the browser (and by extension, the user).

Yay!

[omeomi]

If there's one thing that I wake up every morning with a deep desire to have, it's more random, cutesy, difficult to read fonts on websites.

Re:Yay!

[argent]

I haven't been so excited since JWZ came up with BLINK.

Re:Yay!

[Thelasko]

If you thought Vista was slow now, wait until it has to check with a DRM server to display ANYTHING!

I worked in IT for a summer when I was in college. The company's art department always needed much more powerful computers than the others. As I was setting the machines up, I discovered why they needed such fancy hardware. It was all the damn fonts! Those things made the machines so slow, it was ridiculous.

Re:Yay!

[Samantha Wright]

I'm pretty sure that the market of font designers interested in being able to protect their fonts isn't like that at all. There is a vast, on-going world of typographers who design completely normal, sane, and orderly-looking fonts for typesetting books and newspapers, all of which are respectable, legible, and very much concerned with readability. Because these typographers can't get everyone to buy licenses for their stuff, though, the Internet is reduced to a bare handful of typefaces, most of which aren't even really very good. There's still the obvious moral issue of DRM, but the proponents of the idea are much more serious than that.

Re:Yay!

[jonbryce]

The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US. Microsoft etc get round that by copyrighting the "font software", ie they argue that the .ttf file is actually a computer program that displays the font, and that computer program as distinct from the font design it dispays is copyrightable.

Re:Yay!

[Samantha Wright]

That's very true. The net effect of fonts' uncopyrightableness is that type designers are very sore about their stuff getting ripped off and feel defenceless when it comes to protecting their content. That's why they're so eager to cling to DRM.

Re:Yay!

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Blah blah blah ... I make something and therefore I demand you pay me for it!

Re:Yay!

[Samantha Wright]

In this case it's a little more like "I made something and therefore I demand that you pay me to use it." Operative word being "use," indicating that some transaction is occurring. If it makes you feel any better, in the olden days, department chairs and heads of state would commission fonts (I.e., people would be paid for their time in designing them), and then make their designs publicly available, such as with the Romain du Roi. Most transactions thereafter would involve physical copies of the fount and the labour involved in cutting them.

Re:Yay!

[amorsen]

That's why they're so eager to cling to DRM.

Right, cause noone who already has copyright to "protect" their work has ever tried for DRM in addition... Oh wait, that would be almost all the uses for DRM so far.

Re:Yay!

[Samantha Wright]

It's just added incentive, that's all. I think everyone knows that DRM is normally used as a (bad) copyright enforcement mechanism. You needn't be so hostile.

Re:Yay!

[Haeleth]

The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US.

The outlines aren't. As you note, the expression of those outlines in a specific digital format might be, and a professional TrueType file -- which literally contains a computer program that is executed to produce hinted outlines -- certainly is.

So, in the USA you can print out a font, trace the outlines, and do pretty much anything you like with them, but you'd be unwise to copy a font file directly.

Also, the USA is just one part of a big world, and other places do things differently. In the United Kingdom, for example, it seems fonts are copyrightable, with protection lasting for a surprisingly reasonable 25 years.

Re:Yay!

[nine-times]

The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US.

The outlines aren't. As you note, the expression of those outlines in a specific digital format might be, and a professional TrueType file -- which literally contains a computer program that is executed to produce hinted outlines -- certainly is.

So, in the USA you can print out a font, trace the outlines, and do pretty much anything you like with them, but you'd be unwise to copy a font file directly.

Would the fact that it's really digital matter? I mean, I could understand maybe some argument that says a particular expression of a font is copyrightable, but the font isn't. Now that may be a stupid sentence, but it seems like lawyerly thinking. What it might mean is that you couldn't take a font, trace every letter exactly, and resell the result (or something to that effect), but you could produce your own that was a visual rough copy.

Because it seems to me hard to think about what happens if you copyright fonts and treat them like other copyrighted material. I mean, am I allowed to look at your font, decide I like it, and produce a similar font? How close does it have to be before it's a "derivative work"?

Re:Yay!

[bill_mcgonigle]

You needn't be so hostile.

I've observed this exchange in the past:

  Person 1: Man, that guy is such a jerk.
  Person 2: No, he's just Finnish. That's just their culture.

That may or may not be true, but so much of what defines 'appropriate' behavior is cultural, and Slashdot is an international community, largely consisting of computer geeks, a large subset of which (compared with general society) have poor social reflexes.

Re:Yay!

[magus_melchior]

Why, if that art department has the cash to shell out on frequent hardware upgrades for its computers, didn't they invest in a font server, or at least a decent font manager that doesn't load every single font in the C:\WINDOWS\FONTS folder? Assuming that graphics workstations are set up like ordinary desktop computers is the first major mistake of that department.

Re:Yay!

[wwahammy]

Ya that's not how EOT works. But you're happy with your assumption so good for you!

Re:Yay!

[Thundersnatch]

Microsoft etc get round that by copyrighting the "font software"

Microsoft does NOT make fonts. They license them from companies like Adobe, ITC, Linotype, Monotype, etc. It is those type foundries companies that make all the fonts you see in magazines, newspapers, etc. And they are the ones demanding DRM to protect their revenue stream.

In the graphic design world, font libraries are a non-trivial cost. When I was IT director for a small newspaper in the 1990s, our font library cost about $25,000, and was licensed per output device.

So, you say, just use "open source" fonts. Well, compare the quality and diversity of the Adobe Type Library with the very small, poorly made, poorly kerned, and disorganized collection of open source fonts available on the web. Good typographers cost money, and Adobe (and others) actually pay those typographers.

Re:Yay!

[Luke the Obscure]

A point of clarification:

"The arguments against web fonts are mostly legal. Fonts are intellectual property and therefore, the argument goes, cannot be published on the web. Although the legal status of font shapes is uncertain, font names are probably covered by copyright law. As such, fonts are similar to copyrighted images and text."

From here.

Re:Yay!

[jc42]

Hey, one of the fonts I've had installed for years is the Group Sex font. Talk about cutesy ...

I've used it for headers in a few of my pages, and the people who have the font have told me how much they liked it.

It does have one problem: It doesn't distinguish case. But for headers, that's OK.

DRM on FONTS?!

[Ethanol-fueled]

What...the...fuck?

Next they'll have DRM on colors.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[argent]

Pantone would love that!

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[FunkyELF]

I call #FFFFFF, #000000 and everything inbetween!

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[volxdragon]

Nah, I just filed for a creative use patent on color #458347

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Samantha Wright]

This may come as a shock, but professionally-designed fonts can actually take a year or two to perfect. In terms of effort involved in creating them, DRM on music is probably more absurd.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Jason Levine]

No, no, no. You don't DRM colors. You trademark them.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Radhruin]

Have you tried to sit down and create a font before? Making a font that is suitable for a certain purpose, be it attractive headings and titles or body copy or whatever, takes a very long time, a lot of hard work, a lot of know how, and yes, artistic talent. DRM on a font is no less absurd than DRM on software, music, movies, photos, or the like.

Now, that's not to say that DRM has a place in web fonts, and that's certainly not to say that EOT is the way to implement it. Comparing a font to a color, though, is the utmost of absurdity.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Ed Avis]

Copyright on fonts makes a lot of sense, just as for music, novels, films and a lot of other stuff.

DRM, on the other hand, sounds like a thoroughly nasty idea; in jurisdictions with crazy laws like the DMCA, it could even make free software web browsers (that come with source code so you can modify them) illegal, just as free programs to play DVDs have been made illegal.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Yvan256]

As would UPS.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Firehed]

Dibs on #GGGGGG. I'll make a killing on HDR websites.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Samantha Wright]

I wholeheartedly agree that DRM is a dumb idea. I only meant to indicate that, in terms of effort, fonts are probably more deserving of protection than music.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[funaho]

Not to mention Family Guy fan sites. :)

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[TJamieson]

To be honest, the DRM on fonts is a bit overblown. To create an EOT, you must supply the *beginning* part of the URL to which the font is bound. This is, unfortunately, done with DNS.

That said, if you created "MyDomain1.com", "MyDomainCool.com", "MyDomainIsBest.com", etc., you would need only to generate an EOT bound to "http://mydomain" and it works on all those domains I listed.

Now, though I've said these things, I will also say that EOT is terrible, having worked with it off and on for several years. I'm *dying* for true web fonts in CSS to finally take hold.

One thing many people posting here forget is all the foreign character sets that are not necessarily represented with fonts on an end-user's system. Good luck displaying all of Pashto on an English Win2k machine without (1) fonts installed directly on the machine or (2) web fonts.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[bill_mcgonigle]

This may come as a shock, but professionally-designed fonts can actually take a year or two to perfect. In terms of effort involved in creating them, DRM on music is probably more absurd.

This may come as a shock, but professionally-designed websites can actually take a year or two to perfect. In terms of effort involved in creating them, DRM on HTML and JavaScript has proven to be unnecessary.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Haeleth]

And most stories are just variations of other stories, and most songs are just variations of other songs, and so on. Nihil sub sole novum, and all that -- people have been making this same observation for millenia. Yet for some reason you won't find many people who think it's time to stop coming up with new stories or songs.

Geek argument: Linux is just a variation of Unix,* but you won't find many Slashdotters arguing that people should be allowed to exploit Linux without respecting the wishes of its creators.

* In the sense that most fonts are variations of other fonts; I'm not claiming Linux includes Unix code or anything.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[TheRaven64]

So, everyone will have to start serving their content in iframes pointing at http://microsoft.companyname.com?

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Hatta]

Only because professional typographers are the nitpickiest perfectionists you'll ever meet. No sane person actually cares.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Mr. Slippery]

Copyright on fonts makes a lot of sense, just as for music, novels, films and a lot of other stuff.

Fonts themselves are not subject to copyright in the U.S., and given that we have a plethora of them, it seems no promotion of `science and useful arts' would be served my making them so.

It is argued that computer fonts are actually computer programs and thus subject to copyright.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Samantha Wright]

As a programmer myself, I can assure you that it's a completely different world we're talking about here. Much of the time goes into reshaping the letters so that each letter combination is spaced evenly (there are fewer than 26*26 combinations that need to be worried about, but still quite a few; this is more of a problem in print than on the screen) and programming in hinting information, so that the font looks sharp and crisp at low resolutions instead of a grey mess. (Remember all of those fonts that, in the days before ClearType and ubiquitous anti-aliasing, looked very crude and irregular at small sizes? Those are the ones that weren't hinted properly! Helvetica on KDE 2 is a perfect example.)

It is indeed very nitpicky, but it's not about artistic BS; the artsy phase of a text block font's design is usually much shorter than the engineering phase.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Samantha Wright]

Observe this: http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/kde2final_4.jpg I suspect you're probably spoiled when it comes to computer typography and rarely have to put up with anything bad, since Microsoft airbrushed their fonts to perfection from day one. See how all of the lower-case "w"s don't look quite right? That's why typographers are nitpicky; they spend all of their time getting the hinting correct to prevent this kind of ugliness. The hinting information in Arial took a long time and a lot of co-operation with Monotype to develop; in fact, it developed alongside hinting technology. If you try to scale a vector image to a very small size with no anti-aliasing, you will see rather quickly that it looks even worse than the image above. Fonts are augmented with all sorts of information that makes them stretch the right way when you go from 10pt to 11pt, and this is what typographers spend all of their time doing.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Samantha Wright]

Sorry, correction. Anything BUT Helvetica (at certain sizes) on KDE 2 looks like ass. And even then the Ws are fucked up. I suppose Courier is sort of OK, but it looks rather inferior to Courier New on Windows. All of this is because X (and the copy of Helvetica that came with most Linux distros) had imperfect hinting stuff for a long time.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Ed Avis]

You are right but here we are talking about computer outline fonts, which are a set of data describing which lines and curves to draw. That is copyrightable, although bitmap fonts are not.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Ed Avis]

Imagine writing a book that is 100% original material and fair use of other works, but still having to get permission from the copyright holder on the font to get the book published.

This is not the case at all. The printed image of a letter (or its bitmap when rasterized on a computer screen) is not copyrightable in the USA - perhaps for just the reason you describe. So you can scan and reprint existing printed texts without worrying about font copyright. Only the outline font data - the list of lines and curves to draw to generate a new printed glyph at a given resolution - can be subject to copyright.

Doesn't matter

[Gat0r30y]

The spec for W3C can say whatever it wants. If the standards body makes a mistake, like blessing useless DRM where it doesn't belong, the rest of the web will kindly ignore the stupid standard. Seriously, IE isn't standards compliant, what would keep Mozilla, Safari, any of the other browsers from simply ignoring this?

Re:Doesn't matter

[Westech]

The spec for W3C can say whatever it wants. If the standards body makes a mistake, like blessing useless DRM where it doesn't belong, the rest of the web will kindly ignore the stupid standard. Seriously, IE isn't standards compliant, what would keep Mozilla, Safari, any of the other browsers from simply ignoring this?

How about the fact that being standards compliant is one of the main advantages that Mozilla, Safari, and other browsers currently have over IE? IE ignoring W3C standards has significantly weakened the usefulness of the standards. If other browsers are forced to also begin ignoring the standards due to BS like this being adopted then the existence of the standards will become pointless.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Serious Callers Only]

Indeed - support for @font-face is already here in Safari and is being considered for Firefox.

font-face (not this MS EOT font stuff) is a real boon for web typography - I just wish the W3C had asked some designers/typographers their opinions earlier in the standards process, as currently type on the web is really poor. As for EOT - they tried that years ago, and it didn't take off because of.... DRM. I don't see what they think will be different this time round.

Here's hoping other browser manufacturers simply ignore Microsoft.

Re:Doesn't matter

[broken_chaos]

Really? Mozilla (Gecko) and Safari (Webkit) support -all- standards? Why don't they always render things identically, then? Why do most fancy JavaScript (AJAX - yuck) need browser detection to actually work?

Seriously, there's no browser that supports every standard. They just break them in less ways.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Firehed]

Designers would certainly love the option (I'm not a designer and I would, as I frequently implement someone else's design and hate the whole thing of slicing images of text in an unsupported font), but I envision font designers throwing a shit-fit. All of those non-standard fonts that you have to drop into place with a png (or sIFR) are, in theory, licensed by the designer, so I do understand where they're coming from.

Now almost by design, anything closed-source or DRMed on the web is destined to fail, given the relatively open nature of the web. Even more so when it comes to standards. @font-face is a great alternative if it's adopted outside of Safari; presumably, the DRM thing could be avoided by high-profile sites using non-standard fonts simply getting audited whenever (like they are for software licenses) to ensure they've paid for fonts in use on the site.

Re:Doesn't matter

[msuarezalvarez]

You are very mistaken if you think that strict adherence to the web standards implies rendering in the same way.

Re:Doesn't matter

[gnasher719]

The spec for W3C can say whatever it wants. If the standards body makes a mistake, like blessing useless DRM where it doesn't belong, the rest of the web will kindly ignore the stupid standard. Seriously, IE isn't standards compliant, what would keep Mozilla, Safari, any of the other browsers from simply ignoring this?

It's easy to get all excited because DRM is mentioned, but we should first have a look how adding this to the web standards would help or hurt anyone. With DRM on music there is a clear penalty: It damages interoperability, and it produces the risk that I might not be able to access my music at some point in the future. But in this case here I would want to know what problems it causes.

My understanding is that with everything properly standardised and implemented, a company X could create a webpage using a font F, so that any standard conforming browser can display it properly (as if the user had the font F installed on their machine), but a user viewing the page has no means to extract the font from the web page and install it permanently on their machine. Now if I buy music I have certain expectations what I can do with it, and DRM can interfere with these expectations. When I view a web page, I have no expectations that I could install the fonts used on my machine, so that is fine to me.

Are there things that I would reasonably expect to be able to do with a web site that won't work because of this DRM? Is the spec open so that every browser can implement it without legal problems? Does it create any problems for web designers? (It shouldn't, because any web designer would be free not to use this feature).

Re:Doesn't matter

[42forty-two42]

The "DRM" doesn't even matter. Since the format spec is public, you can do whatever you want to the data anyway. It'd be trivial to strip out all that stuff, and if EOT takes off, I'm sure you'll be able to find such utilities all over the place. Rather than DRM, it's more of an advisory flag - keeping the honest people honest, and the slightly mischievous people can read the spec, and write the trivial remover program; or remove the check from $browser.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Ant P.]

If browsers ignoring standards made the standards pointless... well...

Does _your_ browser support HTML 4.01 fully? Really? Even the SGML parsing rules and align= on table columns? <script defer>?

Re:Doesn't matter

[broken_chaos]

If web standards aren't designed to make pages render in the same manner, what's the point of them then? (I was not referring to pixel-imperfections, but to rather larger details, for example, to do with CSS, colors, and the hover property, that render inconsistently - while being perfectly valid code.)

I mean, if standards don't define how web pages render, then one could make the argument that IE6 is perfectly standards compliant. Just because it doesn't render the same as other browsers doesn't mean it isn't!

what is the point?

[FunkyELF]

I can't believe that today people think DRM actually works. You make it part of some standard, it is cracked 2 days later, then for decades we still have to deal with it.

Why not just assume that it will get cracked, then not implement DRM in the first place?

Re:what is the point?

[Samantha Wright]

Well, the DRM protecting Blu-Ray discs hasn't been cracked yet. Also, in the case of fonts, their primary vulnerability isn't large-scale commercial IP infringement, or hardcore piracy, but casual downloaders. If you type "free fonts" into Google, most of the stuff on the first page has quietly filtered out of corporations via bored secretaries and wage-slaves armed with floppies. DRM as a hurdle is perceived as being able to drastically reduce casual piracy, which is what typographers and font foundries get bitten the hardest by. Since fonts are perceived as totally valueless by the average person (as rather evidenced by some of the comments in this discussion), there's a lot of sharing that goes on, and that has more of an effect than cracking groups dedicated to the business--so DRM looks like the right tool for the right job.

Re:what is the point?

[xRizen]

Untrue. BD+ hasn't been cracked, but it hasn't really been used yet. Most BDs still use the same DRM HD-DVD used. (I forget what it's called.)

Re:what is the point?

[Samantha Wright]

My apologies for conflating the two. BD+, then, stands as an example of DRM so horrendous that it presently remains unbroken. I tend to recall that it also has a much higher chance of being at least as difficult to re-crack as it was to crack the first time, a luxury that HD-DVD and BD discs don't enjoy, thereby making matters even more painful. (In any case, though, garden-variety DRM still remains cumbersome to casual ripping-off, which is the main problem in the font world!)

Re:what is the point?

[bd-asc]

EOT is not DRM. Read the specs. EOT simply leverages the existing font embedding information built into TrueType and OpenType fonts.

Re:what is the point?

[Caetel]

AnyDVD HD is claimed to circumvent BD+

DRM fonts now!

[maestroX]

Finally, an opportunity to deface Comic-Sans!

http://bancomicsans.com/home.html

Most web sites use Windows standard fonts anyway

[burnitdown]

If you design a web site, you want it to show up looking roughly the same on most browsers. For simplicity's sake, most people use the standard fonts (and Mac equivalents).

http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html

If we're going to be embedding fonts, obviously we want as few boring, cumbersome procedures as possible. Forcing us to regenerate pages to approve font use counts as one of these.

Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree on this one.

Re:Linux users install MS fonts???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I do. Ubuntu even has a package: http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/msttcorefonts

10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[argent]

Font designers are not going to allow their creations to be installed and used for free on a million PCs.

Who cares...

The question here is whether or not we want the special fonts.

I won't use it anyway.

And BTW, that "monopoly" was greatly aided by the early Linux desktop adopters.

What in the name of Turing's Sainted Mother are you talking about?

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[argent]

Actually, I care, because it's already too damned hard to specify that you want your pages rendered in a san-serif font as it is. What kind of sick weirdo decided that Times Roman was a sane default? If I was god of the Internet BODY { font-style: san-serif; } would DTRT. But no, you have to maintain an ever-growing font-family list...

if you're old enough, remember what what Linux desktops used to look like before 2003.

I'm old enough to remember what UNIX desktops looked like before 1973, kid, but my free UNIX of choice is FreeBSD and my window manager of choice is Windowmaker, so I have no idea what happened in 2003. Was it fierce?

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[dedazo]

What kind of sick weirdo decided that Times Roman was a sane default?

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Microsoft. That's besides the point though, whether you think this is useful for you is irrelevant. There are people who want everyone to browse the web with Lynx. That doesn't mean we listen to them.

but my free UNIX of choice is FreeBSD

Right, so I fail to see the reason for your faux outrage over this. Again, you don't care either way about all this, so why are you even discussing it?

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[argent]

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Microsoft.

What does that have to do with anything?

Again, you don't care either way about all this

Where did I say that? My point was that the OP was in that group, not that I was.

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[foniksonik]

uh, it's a proven fact that serif fonts are easier to read but harder to scan.

If you want someone to READ your content then serif... if you just want them to scan then sans... you must be a scanner.

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[TheRaven64]

You might want to check that 'fact'. At low dot counts, sans serif fonts are easier to read. At higher DPI, serif fonts are. On the printed page, at a minimum of 300dpi and going up to around 2400dpi, there is no contest. On an eInk display at 166dpi, serif is slightly better. Below that (ignoring large sized text) the antialising makes serifs harder to distinguish or, if there is no antialiasing, they look blocky and uneven.

Most computer monitors are in the 70-120dpi range. Let's pick 100 as a rough midpoint. This means that a 11pt (fairly large, but not unusual for blocks of text) character is around 15 pixels tall. A serif on that is going to be spread over a maximum of three pixels, and so will appear just as a blurry blob, or as a single pixel if there is no antialiasing.

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[adrianbaugh]

For most people, perhaps. Unfortunately it's also well proven that people with certain types of reasonably common visual / neurological disability find serif fonts much harder to read than sans. So you're properly screwing up accessibility for a few people just for the sake of a marginal improvement for everyone else.

And I'm highly skeptical of your claim that sans is easier to scan - in many sans fonts l, 1 and I, and O and 0 are extremely difficult for OCR to distinguish without using contextual information.

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[WWWWolf]

Look up msttcorefonts, and if you're old enough, remember what what Linux desktops used to look like before 2003.

Oh, you mean that! Uh, we used to have the same fonts as Mac folks: Times and Helvetica and stuff. You know, the GPL URW++ PostScript fonts. You know, the ones that come with the GIMP in, what, 1998 or even before that?

Don't tell me people actually kept using the ugly bitmap renditions that shipped with X11? Those went first out of door!

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[dedazo]

What does that have to do with anything?

The premise of the article...?

Where did I say that?

Where you said you didn't care about DRM in fonts, wouldn't use them, and don't even run Linux when I mentioned why msttcorefonts had helped the alleged "monopoly" to grow.

If you read your own posts maybe you can make some sense out of them. I know I had a hard time of it.

Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..."

[foniksonik]

uh by scanning I meant visual scanning... as in reading down the page quickly to find what you're looking for.

Your browser doesn't support ANSI X3.64!

[argent]

Just because a standard exists ^[1mdoesn't^[0m mean it has to be supported.

Re:Your browser doesn't support ANSI X3.64!

[Darkness404]

No, when it comes to something as major as the web, all major standards (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) need to be adhered to by the standards. For example, Canvas has a lot of potential, unfortunately MS seems determined not to include that in IE.

Re:Your browser doesn't support ANSI X3.64!

[argent]

No, when it comes to something as major as the web, all major standards (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) need to be adhered to by the standards.

Assuming you mean what I think you were trying to say (...by the standard browsers? Something like that?), where do you get the idea that this embedded font scheme is a "major standard"?

standards are the way to go

[houbou]

Hey, Microsoft can keep their DRM scheme, I care about cross browser performance and compatibility, so I want all my sites to look similar or the same, that being said, obviously, I don't see anyone who is a developer wanting to support DRM'ed fonts. Heck DRM is clearly not working with audio/video formats, why the heck should it work with fonts?

Re:Monopoly

[Samantha Wright]

Well, this article isn't talking about Microsoft's stranglehold on typefaces as much as it is about their stranglehold on standards. If you want to be nitpicky, Adobe and Linotype set the standard typefaces and Microsoft requisitioned Monotype to rip them off; we're more in the shadow of Adobe's decisions than we are those of Microsoft.

Bogus

[Relic of the Future]

Bogus argument. You could make the same claims for images; but the lack of drm in .jpg, .gif, and .png didn't stop anyone from putting images online. Hell, TEXT enjoys copyright protection, and there's all kinds of that, plain as day for anyone to "steal", embeded in every .html file!

W3C should decline, forcefully. And tell those font designers to deal with the protections on their fonts the same way everyone else deals with protections on their copyright-protected works: when you notice it, sue.

Re:Bogus

[miserere nobis]

Bogus argument. You could make the same claims for images; but the lack of drm in .jpg, .gif, and .png didn't stop anyone from putting images online.

Sure it did. Have you ever been to a web site that sells clip art or stock photos? Or one that sells posters, paintings, or prints, including those photo sharing web sites where you can download a small picture or buy a full-resolution digital version? The web site of an art museum that has display restrictions from the owners of some of the works on loan from other galleries? Have you ever used Google Earth or another satellite imagery site? The web is full of images that have been shrunk, reduced in quality, or watermarked to prevent people from taking the full versions without paying for them. Almost anyplace where the image itself is what is for sale, you see people refraining from posting original, full-quality images online.

Re:Bogus

[Vexorian]

From your argument, I am understanding that it not only did not stop people from putting images online it even allowed those with commercial images to notice that DRM wasn't even needed.

Re:Bogus

[bd-asc]

Type designers and commercial font developers simply do not want their fonts posted to web sites in the native TrueType or OpenType formats. They would prefer an approach that makes it easy for honest people to do honest things - which is what EOT offers. So if web developers want additional fonts to use in formatting websites the only solution will be using free fonts. Sure there are thousands of free fonts out there, but you get what you pay for. Lousy quality when used at text sizes, incomplete character sets, etc. There are some nice open source fonts, but these are in the minority. Web designers and creative professionals would LOVE to be able to use the same fonts they buy to use for print and web graphics. EOT represents an approach that finally will solve the web fonts problem, with the support of the font developer community.

Re:Bogus

[miserere nobis]

Huh? It absolutely stopped people from putting images online-- they put up replacement, degraded images instead. Far from "notic[ing] that DRM wasn't even needed," they all have tried to find a way to solve exactly the same problem that DRM tries to solve: controlled access to copyrighted works. Were there a good DRM solution, they probably would have jumped on it, because it would allow people to see the actual image in previewing their purchases, instead of relying on some low-quality substitute. It is hard to sell a visual product when the potential buyer isn't allowed to see the actual product, but only a crappy reproduction of reduced size.

Re:Bogus

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Easy for honest people to do the honest thing"

As long as those honest people don't mind paying extra to licence IP designed specifically to control them(and nobody knows that there are no honest people using FOSS, or opposed to DRM, after all).

I have no problem with the font developers being paid for their work. If they want to put their greasy little hands on my computer, though, they can fuck off.

Re:Bogus

[nahdude812]

Web fonts are going to end up supporting the minimal character set; fonts with a large character set get too sizy. Arial Unicode, for example, is 22.7 meg.

Also there really are a lot of great free fonts out there. Not all of them are good for text level formatting, but not all of them are intended for that. Check out http://creamundo.com/ (which unfortunately seems to be suffering some stability problems this morning)

Re:Bogus

[Nurgled]

That's possible, but since true DRM is a logical fallacy (you can't simultaneously give someone access to data and not give them access to it at the same time) your argument seems kinda moot.

As an example, I point to Second Life where they tried to use a form of DRM to create a market for textures and 3D models. Some people went as far as taking the data directly out of their computer's video memory in order to create unauthorized copies of this data. Unless you can control everything from your server right to the user's neurons then someone will find a way to create copies, and it only takes one person to publish how to do it before everyone and his dog is doing it. See DVD CSS for another example.

Re:Simple

[jonbryce]

Who cares what font designers say. US copyright law says they have no choice in the matter. Font designs are not copyrightable.

This isn't a problem anymore

[42forty-two42]

Simply put, Firefox now has enough audience that web designers can't ignore it. Either EOT can be implemented with open-source code in firefox, which means its decryption scheme will be right out there in the open (and firefox can even simply fail to implement the DRM portions) - or it will only work in IE, which means it's unlikely to be used anywhere it matters.

Re:This isn't a problem anymore

[jmorris42]

> Simply put, Firefox now has enough audience that web designers can't ignore it.

Except Moz Corp has a plan for this eventuallity. Only binaries blessed by Moz Corp can be called Firefox. So when the time comes they link to a binary blob and still call Firefox Open Source. Like Steve Jobs, Moz Corp can get people to drink the Kool-Aid. At least they will be able to get enough people to believe that they have no other option than to believe it. "Oh, Microsoft is pushing this thing, everyone will use it and we will be left behind. This is the only way we can compete, blah blah blah."

Re:This isn't a problem anymore

[42forty-two42]

Good luck linking a binary blob into the rendering engine in a way that doesn't allow you to slurp it out by modifying said rendering engine. Moreover, what possible benefit would Mozilla have from such an action? It would just burn bridges, with no real benefit.

It's all moot anyway though - if anyone actually bothers to read the spec, there's no DRM - you only need to regenerate it because the fonts are compressed by removing characters not used by the page in question (which is a reasonable idea, although possibly a bit annoying depending on the implementation). There are bits controlling embedding permissions, but this is trivial to work around. They're better thought of as a machine-readable license statement; it's trivial to read them, replace them, ignore them, whatever, all in a nicely GPLv3'd debian package consisting of a few dozen lines of C code if you want.

Re:This isn't a problem anymore

[magus_melchior]

That will depend on how many web developers Microsoft can sweet-talk into a deal that includes the heavy use of EOT. ISO meets prescriptions-for-pens doctors.

But I agree that the impact will be negligible. They would have to make it a required IIS upgrade, and even then, it'll introduce enough problems that admins will avoid it like the plague.

Point isn't DRM, but the leverage provided

[zooblethorpe]

The DRM itself isn't the point. The point is the leverage that DRM provides, when combined with dubious things like the DMCA and the BSA. The point is that this gives MS one more club with which to beat people. "Our unannounced raid on your offices shows that you've used our fonts without authorization. Under the provisions of the DMCA, you are now liable for criminal charges ... or we could instead graciously *license* those fonts to you for the mere sum of US$200K, and forget this ever happened."

The DRM itself is not the point. It is merely the means to another end.

Cheers,

Re:Simple

[Dynedain]

Who cares what font designers say. US copyright law says they have no choice in the matter. Font designs are not copyrightable.

Perhaps not, but the data files that store the font are copyrightable and are copyrighted. Which means if you embed those font files in your website (maybe you'd like a nice title like Slashdot in something other than Arial), then you're violating copyright law.

non-sequitor...

[smittyoneeach]

If we can put a man on the moon, why can't I have a pony?

Bad idea

[QuoteMstr]

If we allow people to use custom fonts, they'll just start using weird fonts for internationalization instead of unicode. They'll lie and claim to be 8859-1, and in the end, we'll just return a web of babel.

Re:Simple

[jonbryce]

Depends what kind of files you use. Linking to a series of .svg files is most likely fine. .ttf files with all the hinting information could be a problem. You can make your own though with some font creation software and the existing font, and there is nothing they can do about it.

Completely ineffectual DRM

[ThreeDayMonk]

I've read the EOT spec. The DRM is trivally, hilariously bad:

This flag indicates that the FontData array and EUDCFotData array (if present) has been encrypted using an XOR algorithm using an XOR key of 0x50 on each byte of the font data. This happens on final data, after compression and subsetting. The font must be decrypted using the XOR key to accesses the font data.

In addition, whilst it is possible to embed only those glyphs needed, anyone who's using a CMS is realistically going to be embedding all the glyphs needed for the language anyway.

So why bother?

Re:Completely ineffectual DRM

[Todd Knarr]

I suspect it's a "You knew it was wrong." feature. It's not intended to stop people from stealing the data so much as to make it impossible for them to claim they didn't know they weren't supposed to. Much like a simple chain-link fence with a locked gate: the lock isn't really stopping anybody, it's trivial to jump/climb over the fence and bypass the lock completely, but there's no way you can do that and claim you didn't realize somebody intended access to be restricted. Same thing here, if your software understands that flag and does the decryption needed nobody's going to believe you if you claim you didn't realize the font had restrictions on it.

Embedded OpenType (EOT)

[loconet]

OpenType.

Hey Microsoft, "Open", you keep using that word but I don't think it means what you think it means.

Re:Embedded OpenType (EOT)

[XaXXon]

Anybody want a peanut?

Alternate Acronym

[Thought1]

EOT also equals End Of Types? (:

The 'DRM hole'

[JSBiff]

Any DRM system for 'public distribution' is destined for failure. Why? Because, ultimately, you have to give the end-user some way to decrypt the raw font/music/video/whatever. If the user can decrypt it, there is NOTHING that can technically stop them from extracting the unencrypted data (as long as someone, somewhere, can write an app which pretends to be the 'legitimate app', but in reality does something the 'legitimate app' does not, like offering to save the font data to a file for you).

Encryption works to protect data between 1 part and 1 other party, where those two parties agree to not share the data with anyone else. Trying to use encryption to protect 'mass-market' distribution is a logical impossibility. Either I can or cannot decrypt the data, and if I can, I've got it, and can potentially give it to others.

Re:Simple

[QuoteMstr]

All right: load the font (not a violation of copyright, as per USC 17.101). Examine its outlines and re-encode them separately. For bonus points, use a different outline format (say, Type 1).

You'll end up with a file that shares none of its bytes with the original file, but that still describes the same font. (Sans hinting, but who needs that these days?) I don't think the new "font program" would qualify as a derivative work because the only commonality between it and the old file is the geometry of the font itself, which cannot be copyrighted.

PDF

[argent]

If you want precise fonts, use PDF.

As far as I know, PDF has supported embedded fonts from the start. There are some people who obsess over fonts embedded in their PDF documents and using exactly the right font, and what's the impact?

Most people don't even notice.

Trying to turn HTML into PDF has never worked well.

If it doesn't even make a difference for PDF, why should we care?

Re:PDF

[Samantha Wright]

It's not exactly revolutionary to say that most people don't care about art or design. But fonts can do a lot of things nonetheless: they might contain drop-caps that don't turn into a nasty pixelated mess when printed, or they might contain other ornaments, or an alien script for a sci-fi novel. The main advantage here is that they're in a vector format with a lower overhead than SVG.

On top of that, this can sort of be correlated to the holocaust of the GNOME stupidity debate. Why should the people who do want nice features and customization be forced to suffer because the majority simply doesn't care or won't notice? Body fonts can do a great many things with apparently subtle changes, from making a page look very antiquated to expressing emotions. Maybe not everyone notices it, but it still provides an important element of the experience tot hose who do.

Also, this could mean fewer flash banners made in the name of interesting fonts. (I can't think of any, but I'm sure it's been done.)

Re:PDF

[argent]

But fonts can do a lot of things nonetheless: they might contain drop-caps that don't turn into a nasty pixelated mess when printed,

like this?

Why should the people who do want nice features and customization be forced to suffer because the majority simply doesn't care or won't notice?

Are you talking about PDF, or HTML?

If you want to deliver a print-quality document, use a format that's designed for print-quality output, like a Postscript derivative like PDF, not one that's designed for readability on a huge variety of display devices at the cost of accurate rendering.

Re:PDF

[Samantha Wright]

No, like this.

Perhaps PDF is the way to go for print-quality documents, but there's still the field (albeit somewhat futuristic still) in between of resolution-independent graphics and high-DPI displays; such is the point of SVG and the half-implemented scheme Apple designed for Leopard. Expecting everyone to use PDFs for their eighty-bazillion DPI laz0r-displays or live with 72-DPI images standing in for what should be high-res vectors is not good enough.

Re:PDF

[bill_mcgonigle]

and the half-implemented scheme Apple designed for Leopard.

Hey, Apple's been half-implementing that stuff for two decades! :)

OSX, nee OpenStep (nee NeXTStep), has been using resolution-independent display (DPS, DPDF) forever. Their GUI elements just don't support it yet. Word is they'll be getting off their butts to fix this for Snow Leopard. We'll see.

Expecting everyone to use PDFs for their eighty-bazillion DPI laz0r-displays or live with 72-DPI images standing in for what should be high-res vectors is not good enough.

I'm not following - why are inline PDF's or SVG's insufficient? Because IE doesn't have native SVG support?

Re:PDF

[h4rm0ny]

A little off topic, but this is as good a place as any... Samantha - you clearly know quite a bit about fonts and liking to present both my documents and websites in the best possible way, can you recommend any good sources of reading, guides to font use or font libraries (for want of knowing the correct terminology) ? It's always been a slightly impenetrable area to me (not helped by working on a Linux system).

No matter if not, but how often do I encounter an expert on fonts? :)

Re:PDF

[argent]

Oh, you said dropcaps but you meant illuminated manuscripts.

When the glorious day comes and we have futuristic 600 dpi touchscreens on every surface, get back to me. In the meantime one or two SVGs per page isn't going to make a big difference... and I'm still not sure I want to see a web page that looks like the Book of Kells.

Re:PDF

[Samantha Wright]

The protest is more about "PDFs and SVGs have huge overhead." TTF and OTF are nimble binary formats, SVG is a terrifyingly slow XML-ish text format not suited to long passages of text that could take up screenfuls of real estate, and PDF is a document encapsulation format with a huge number of features (including things like embedded 3D and javascript) that are totally excessive if all you want to do is use a font. Also, an embedded PDF would not be re-CSS-able. Font formats are the appropriate tool for the job, even if other methods can be used. Not every use of an embedded font is a drop-cap, after all; that's just an example. (There are also a number of drop-cap fonts.)

Re:PDF

[nine-times]

I'm not following - why are inline PDF's or SVG's insufficient? Because IE doesn't have native SVG support?

I think she was just trying to point out that on the one end, you have PDF which allows pixel-perfect design at the cost of complexity and HTML which is simpler, but tends to be difficult to create design for. It's really not that controversial an idea-- that HTML+CSS (especially given the current implementations across browsers) makes design more difficult than it needs to be. That's why all the major browsers have been working on implementing features to improve design control (including the font issue we're talking about now).

Re:PDF

[Samantha Wright]

Alas, typographers, being designers, have mostly fallen into the blogosphere these days. To get a feel for fonts, the best suggestion I can give is to plunge your head into designer-blog-land; the only alternative is to take an actual course in the stuff. Above all blogs, I'd recommend I Love Typography. Theoretical articles, reviews of typefaces, history of type, interviews with typographers, samples of fonts in use, etc. It's where I caught on to my (totally nonprofessional!) interest in the stuff. Typophile might be of interest too; it's an active forum populated with a variety of opinions and questions, and probably a pretty good place to ask questions, if that's what you're after.

Re:PDF

[Samantha Wright]

A major use for embedded typography does tend to revolve around cases where, yes, accurately reproducing historical presentations is significant. But there are still alien scripts, obscure Unicode subranges that most fonts don't support, and newspapers that want their distinctive typeface to also represent them on the web—since, right now, they've pretty much got the choice between Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, and Verdana. All of these are perfectly valid justifications for embedded typefaces as well, even if you don't like printer's ornaments or illuminations.

Re:PDF

[mccabem]

The protest is more about "PDFs and SVGs have huge overhead.

"The protest" seems to be missing the point that a Microsoft/Microsoft-Adobe/etc DRM system just to support embedded web fonts - an obviously marginal feature in the grand scheme - is "huge overhead" in more ways than just words.

-Matt

Re:PDF

[Samantha Wright]

First, the DRM scheme proposed is XORing the data with 0x50. So, it's not really much overhead. Second, that's overhead calculated once when the page is loaded; current implementations of SVG are still dog-slow on every refresh or scroll. Third, font handling is also lower-level in the system than a browser's SVG renderer has any right to be, and will always be innately faster.

Re:PDF

[KGIII]

If you get bored, find a copy of the movie 'Helvetica' sometime.

Re:PDF

[h4rm0ny]

Wow! There is some beautiful work on ilovetypography.com and the typophile site looks interesting too (though completely unusable in the Konqueror browser). Thank you very much for those. Interesting and useful.

Cheers,
H.

Re:PDF

[Samantha Wright]

Yes. I absolutely recommend it as a gateway drug to understanding fonts. It used to be on Google Video; Digg has a copy at present.

Re:PDF

[Ant P.]

I'm not sure what you were trying to demonstrate with that link - maybe that the assumption that every OS will have 100px "Times" installed is completely wrong? The page is broken in X11.

DRM doesn't make sense for any standard

[Sloppy]

W3C shouldn't do it, but not merely because DRM is harmful to everyone. There's a deeper reason. They shouldn't do, because it doesn't make sense.

The whole point of standards is to have a spec that anyone can implement, such that differing implementations of different parts, will interoperate.

The whole point of DRM is to PREVENT interoperable implementations!

It's not just dumb to put DRM in a standard; it's a contradiction to put DRM in a standard. If the DRM works, then it's not a standard, and if it's a standard, then the DRM doesn't work.

Re:DRM doesn't make sense for any standard

[bd-asc]

EOT (Embedded OpenType), as proposed by Microsoft and Monotype, is not DRM. Unfortunately this mis-perception has taken a life of its own. EOT has a lot of features to offer web designers & developers beyond native TrueType fonts including character set subsetting, file size compression, and font embedding permissions.

SIFR

[Mr 44]

If this helps get rid of the complete abomination that is SIFR, I'm all for it.

You've got to appreciate the fact that it actually works, but it is such a giant hack...

Brimming Over with Wrongability

[ewhac]

HTML is a semantic markup language, not a presentation markup language. Stylesheets allow presentation specification, but the stylesheets were separated from HTML expressly to attempt to preserve HTML's semantic nature.

Thus, we don't even need to get to the copy protection issue -- the mere idea of binding fonts to an HTML page at all is utterly laughable on its face. It belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what HTML is and the set of problems it's intended to address.

If image is more important to you than content, then go play with PDF -- that's what it's for -- and leave HTML alone.

Schwab

Re:Brimming Over with Wrongability

[Anonymous Coward]

Stylesheets allow presentation specification, but the stylesheets were separated from HTML expressly to attempt to preserve HTML's semantic nature.

Yes, and web fonts are part of stylesheets, not HTML, so what's your point? It seems you're so eager to repeat your "HTML is not presentation" mantra that you have failed to grasp the relevant facts of the matter.

Re:Brimming Over with Wrongability

[bryguy5]

That's why this is a CSS specification and not an HTML one. @font-face goes in the style sheet (or style tag) and controls presentation.

Re:Simple

[mr_matticus]

An anomalous decision based on a doctrine of utility and an ancient case fearing the locking-up of communication. The concern is rooted in the pre-digital age when typefaces were far more limited in number. Subsequent case law has been treading deeper into protection of the creative aspects of typeface design, particularly in light of counterexamples in Europe--copyright protection there has increased the competitive marketplace for typefaces and has resulted in no such "lockdown" on information, as the preexisting set of typefaces remains free and open to use, and all works produced on validly licensed fonts are free to use. Further, any infringement is incumbent on the producer, and avoidance is simply the use of one of the public domain, free, or purchased fonts the producer has lawful use of.

Not all typefaces would be copyrightable under the Merger Doctrine anyway, even ignoring the hundreds of typefaces ineligible for protection from the outset. Commercial typefaces can be improved through copyright protection, giving US artists an ability to compete on the international stage.

This of course, brings us to the greater point: the United States is obliged to honor the European copyrights on typefaces as a signatory to the Berne Convention. Thus, many fonts are afforded copyright protection. It's simply that due to a quirk in our Copyright Act (which we are technically obliged to change to harmonize with Europe due to international IP agreements) and an old SCOTUS decision, the typeface itself is not copyrightable here. Other means of economic protection are, however, available independent of copyright, and are used for some of the high-end typefaces and packages.

Copyright on typefaces would actually stir competition and make more fonts available freely (as in money), while continuing to permit the design and copyright-free release of typefaces to those who wish to do so. It would also eliminate a US-only oddity.

The concern about copyright on typefaces is intuitively appealing, but in practice is not a true concern. In fact, the scope of protection is so narrow that any form of independent creation without direct reproduction counts as a new typeface, so there can never be an impenetrable thicket.

Re:Linux users install MS fonts???

[Bert64]

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

Home Depot claimed a color was copyrighted

[Geof]

Chose a Ralph Lauren color chip. Went to Home Depot to have it mixed in their brand of paint. They refused. Said the color was copyrighted. Asked a different staff member on a different day - same response. This is in Canada, where despite stronger copyright law in many areas this kind of silliness seems to be rarer.

IANAL, but I don't believe the law supports the copyright of a color (a collection of colors might be a different matter). That's in theory. Practice, unless you have buckets of cash for lawyers, is another matter.

Re:Home Depot claimed a color was copyrighted

[swb]

Don't they SELL Ralph Lauren paint there? That might have something to do with it.

You should take it to a paint store like Sherwin Williams where they sell their own brand, or at least cut off all the identifying information that shows its a Ralph Lauren color.

At the very worst, buy the smallest quantity, put some on a hunk of wood or sheetrock and then take it in to a paint store and have them match the actual paint.

Re:Home Depot claimed a color was copyrighted

[bryce4president]

That's funny. Being a painter as an aside to my job in the technology field, I can take anything I want down to my paint store and they'll color match it and mix it for me. They can patent a paint formula, but if a competitor wants to do a color match and get an almost identical color there isn't a thing they can do about it.

Home Depot must be full of smrt lawers.

Re:Most web sites use Windows standard fonts anywa

[dkf]

If you design a web site, you want it to show up looking roughly the same on most browsers. For simplicity's sake, most people use the standard fonts (and Mac equivalents).

That's deeply foolish, you know. Users can (and do) set their own style sheets, and they are even more likely to change the size of the fonts in use. Expecting a page to look exactly as someone designed it to be is silly; "web designers" need to get used to the fact (and I've been going on about this on and off since before such a job description existed).

Only in an ideal world...

[Roger W Moore]

Copyright on fonts makes a lot of sense

In an ideal world I'd agree. However the way things seem to be going I'd be dead against it because some corporate lawyer would find away to make me pay to use my own handwriting.

Re:Monopoly

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

[S]hould 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?"

Am I missing something? It seems to me that the very thing Microsoft is proposing - a standard for enforcing font file copy rights - is the thing the linked article suggests is necessary to break Microsoft's "monopoly" on web fonts.

I believe the monopoly referenced is MS's monopoly influence on the Web browser and, hence, Web technologies markets.

Re:Most web sites use Windows standard fonts anywa

[Samantha Wright]

The lack of diversity in font use is a symptom, not proof that this is unnecessary. Designers and webmasters have become used to limited choices, just like governments and corporations have gotten used to Helvetica, or people have gotten used to *ahem* the intolerability of Windows. Embedded fonts would let this problem be escaped, which publishers in the printed world have been doing for a few years now. (Yes, the notion of having to regenerate a font is ugly, as is DRM, but having more fonts is very compatible with making each site have its own unique identity. And that identity probably isn't going to be Wingdings 2.)

Re:Monopoly

[amliebsch]

It's not, I RTFA. It's about the fact that the Microsoft Core Web fonts - which they gave away for free and conseuently don't need DRM - dominate the www.

Not sure

[Schnoodledorfer]

It will depend on how "slimy" the campaign for EOT is. If something is slimy enough, /. actually thinks it's cool.

/. will never get tired of watching "Ghostbusters".

A no brainer

[Vexorian]

If W3C doesn't respond to this with a good nice "fuck off"... Well, I don't really think there's another possible scenario in this case, really. W3C agreeing with DRM, which is against just about everything they have been advocating regarding how the web should work is just non-sense... I think MS was probably intending to send this to ECMA or some other dummy standards body.

required reading

[mlinksva]

See the Wikipedia article and the W3C team comment on the submission

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_OpenType

http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/01/Comment

Re:required reading

[bryguy5]

Thanks for some actual info. I was on bugzilla just the other day trying to figure out if FireFox was actually going to have @font-face support for 3.1

This is a huge issue from web design perspective. Imagine the bandwidth we would save if we didn't create jpegs or gifs for our "branding" fonts.

Everyone is hung up on the DRM but the reason this is being considered is.

1) It's a good compresson algorithm.
Fonts are smaller - Compressed and only the subset actually used by the font needs to be downloaded.

2) Prevents name subset collision

Personally, I hope they approve both EOT and straight TrueType or "OpenType" linking like in Safari and Opera.

I just hope they don't take the WC3 years to decide and that Mozilla doesn't wait for them. If FireFox would implement one of these 2 methods - doesn't really matter which one - I could quit hearing the graphic designers moan over how bad the page looks since we had to switch all the fonts to the same boring 10 ones.

I wouldn't have to support the evil IP DRM folks either. I could use eclusively free fonts and include both EOT non tethered and straight tty files on the site. A conditional comment, javascript, or CSS hacks later and We've finally overcome one the last hurdle to good static 2D web design for all the browsers I care about (IE, Safari, FireFox, Opera)

Leave web alone!

[teh.f4ll3n]

MS has found yet another absolutelly useless way of amusing itself. I mean who, besides MS's braindead marketing & innovation departments, need that crap? I don't, I like my web with a standard easily-readable font. MS should do us all a favour and limit their ideas to themselves.

No different than photos on the Web

[hirschma]

Why isn't this an issue with rights-encumbered photos and images on the web?

You can buy photos today. Some are licensed for a Web audience, some are not. There are technologies to find illegal use of photos out there, and more coming.

Fonts can be same way - either licensed for a Web audience, or not. It should be trivial to detect those that abuse such licensing, much more so than images.

So - what is so special about fonts that they require the DRM treatment? Let the free market sort it out. If paying for Web license is too much, people will just use "standard" fonts, or they'll resort to using flash or other silliness.

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:Simple

[foniksonik]

a relevant link

Srsly?

[bill_mcgonigle]

The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US

Really? So if I make a program that takes an Adobe font, renders it into very high resolution raster, do edge detection on that, and write back my own TTF file, I can freely redistribute them? No design patents or anything?

Re:Srsly?

[F�an�ro]

Really? So if I make a program that takes an Adobe font, renders it into very high resolution raster, do edge detection on that, and write back my own TTF file, I can freely redistribute them? No design patents or anything?

Should work, but font design is more thant that. For starters, a font is not simply scaled down for lower resolutions, there are some manual adjustments neccessary, and you would have to do kerning right.

But IIRC some fonts were basicaly designed this way

Re:Srsly?

[Serious Callers Only]

Well, yes, that's basically how many of the Adobe fonts are made after all - they are based on scans of older font outlines - see the various Garamond fonts, etc...

Read all about it here

While creating type can take a long time (sometimes years for a single typeface), apparently the foundries are determined to stick to their old models of selling each family $200. If they sold them for $2 a weight there wouldn't be any point in trying to copy designs, and they'd sell infinitely more fonts. As it is they mainly sell to institutions and companies.

Foundries are going to have to adapt or die, and this initiative from MS is aimed at keeping them in the dark ages. It's going to appeal to no one but the foundries. And if the foundries persist it issuing silly EULAs which forbid use of fonts on the web, people will just route round them by creating their own fonts - there's nothing to stop someone producing high quality copies of some classics but the time it takes to set up kerning etc.

Re:Talk to Monotype

[rkanodia]

Holy Christ on crutches; I always assumed that Baskerville had been created recently and named as an homage to The Hound of the Baskervilles, since it's a good font for Victorian detective stories. Thanks for the information.

I think artists, typographers, etc should be paid

[pembo13]

Just not every time someone wants to see their work.

Remember the ISO "vote"

[QuietLagoon]

...when Microsoft bought its way to approval of what it wanted? Microsoft has lots of cash. Why should the W3C be any different?

Re:Most web sites use Windows standard fonts anywa

[Marillion]

This is because you are confusing cause and effect. You call it Simplicity, I call it lowest common denominator. Most people use the standard fonts because the have to, not because they want to. I work at an organization with a corporate branding strategy that uses a font that isn't one of the "standards." This automatically makes all the web sites I build non-compliant with the branding strategy unless I can somehow embed that font in the web page or render parts of the site as graphics.

WTO, WIPO = World...

[zooblethorpe]

It has apparently escaped your notice, but the US is very busy trying to propagate its particular legal interpretation of "intellectual property" throughout the rest of the world, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization, among other avenues. The DMCA itself might be specific to the US, but similar laws have been passed or at least proposed across much of the rest of the globe.

The DMCA! Coming Soon to a Country Near You!!! TM (c) (r) (pat. pend.) ...

Cheers,

Slimy?

[linear a]

Gotta like articles that use the word 'slimy' in the first line. Pretty much ensures fair and reasonable content

Re:Fonts are tricky on the web

[QuoteMstr]

That's why outline fonts were created. They're traditionally hinted by hand: it's doable, if tedious. Autohinters have made a lot of progress though, and the results look decent, especially with antialiasing.

Conventional foolishness

[argent]

uh, it's a proven fact that serif fonts are easier to read but harder to scan.

At 600 dpi, I'll believe that.

Even at 300 dpi, most serif typefaces suffer from rendering problems.

At 72 dpi, most serif fonts simply can not be rendered even vaguely accurately at reasonable point sizes. If they'd picked something like Clarendon it would be a different matter, but Times Roman? That's where "conventional wisdom" turns into "conventional foolishness".

Re:Conventional foolishness

[foniksonik]

BTW if you have a personal stylesheet you should easily be able to say:

html, body, p, h1, h1, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
font-family: Arial, sans!important;
}

add in any additional tags you really want to override and voila... it's done.

CSS override priority goes like this:

user agent declarations
user normal declarations
author normal declarations
author important declarations
user important declarations

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/cascade.html#cascading-order

It's really not that complicated

Regarding rendering issues... that's probably an artifact of your machines ability to antialias... on my mac I have no issues with serif fonts at sizes approximately 12px or larger (~11pt).... obviously everything looks better on a mac so YMMV

Re:Linux users install MS fonts???

[Haeleth]

Truetype support sucked on linux back then, so it was a very short lived exercise.

TrueType support still sucks on Linux by default: most distros use the dreadful Freetype auto-hinter, which inflicts unspeakably mangled contortions on font outlines in its misguided desperation to ensure that everything lines up exactly with pixels.

However, it is possible to configure it to use real TrueType hinting (if you like the Windows look and don't care about software patents), and it's also possible to turn hinting off completely and get fonts that look just like the ones on a Mac (very true to the printed appearance, but some people find them too blurry). Do whichever of those two things you prefer, and you can end up with something that you can read without wanting to claw out your own eyeballs in horror.

Does anyone here regularly install those fonts on any linux computer they use? I know I haven't.

Yes; in fact it's not uncommon. For example, Debian's statistics suggest that msttcorefonts is by far the most popular package in their contrib/X11 section, though it's only 1/6 as popular as e.g. the DejaVu fonts.

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.

Re:Beware of trademarks

[bill_mcgonigle]

Thanks. And I see FreeType 2 has an auto-hinter which can render well without using any TrueType hints at all.

C'mon, somebody must've done this already....

Re:Beware of trademarks

[I'm not really here]

Take a look at Helvetica vs. Arial. Basically Yes is a very accurate summation.

The key section of their propaganda

[RCanine]

From Ascender Corp:

Ascender believes that although not perfect, EOT represents the best current solution for type designers and font foundries to protect their Intellectual Property.

Note who their constituency is. Not Web designers. Not users. Not browser makers. Not the health of the Web, etc. This page is to lobby Font Shops to modify their EULA's to allow EOT. Most high-end font shops don't allow embedding at all unless it's in an image. Check out HF&J's ridiculous policy.

Isn't the correct answer...

[mccabem]

From one of the ref'd articles:

Fonts are intellectual property and therefore, the argument goes, cannot be published on the web.

That sounds completely absurd - no IP gets published on the web? Makes me suspect of the author and article.

Anyway, it seems the point of the article is that to get this fancy fontness (great, even more "sizzle" on the Web) you're presently going to have to get down with some MSFT DRM. Unless you've slept through the last two or three decades, you should know better than to even consider the Microsoft option.

Wait/lobby for another solution if this is a real problem.

Aren't open source fonts the correct answer to this problem anyway? Nothing against the font makers, but it seems their product (or maybe just business model) just isn't very compatible with the Internet.*

-Matt

* Or maybe this is only a "problem" for designers and should be suitably ignored as it has been thus far. Already too many resources being poured into design with not enough focusing on quality of content. Enough sizzle already!

Re:Isn't the correct answer...

[Selanit]

I'm not sure why your comment is a reply to mine, since it doesn't respond to any of the points I made. But what the heck, may as well.

... it seems the point of the article is that to get this fancy fontness (great, even more "sizzle" on the Web) you're presently going to have to get down with some MSFT DRM.

Well, no. That wasn't the point of the article at all. Actually, there were so many links in the submitted summary that I'm not actually sure which one was supposed to BE "the article". But the issue runs something like this:

In the '90s Microsoft added downloadable font support to Internet Explorer. Nobody really used it, because it had crappy DRM, it was hard to use, it only worked in IE, and the fonts generally were rendered badly.

Fast forward ten years.

Last March when Safari 3.1 came out, it had support for proper non-DRMed font files. It supports plain old TrueType fonts, and also OpenType fonts (.ttf and .otf, respectively). If you happen to be using Safari, you can look at a demo. In general this made people happy (though not everyone, even among the people who don't live in mortal fear of anything more outre than Verdana).

Hakon Wium Lie, the CTO for Opera, has been agitating for this kind of support for years, and promptly announced that Opera will be supporting that in the near future. There's a link for that in the article above. Shortly Firefox got on board as well -- support for downloadable fonts is scheduled to be released in Firefox 3.1.

After years of waiting, it looks as though web designers are finally, FINALLY going to have the ability to use any font they want, not just the nine fonts from Microsoft's "Web Core Fonts" project. Not everyone thinks that's a good idea, particularly those who tremble at the thought of such power being put in the hands of crappy web designers. And I'll happily admit that there are lots of crappy web designers. But downloadable fonts appear to be on the verge of becoming a reality even so.

The DRM angle comes in because Microsoft has begun trying to get their crappy DRMed format adopted as a W3C standard. Part of their argument is that font foundries won't accept a non-DRM solution, and so Microsoft's solution needs to be the standard everyone uses. Of course that's thoroughly undercut by the fact that Microsoft themselves allow font linking in Silverlight, without DRM, though they do restrict it to same-domain linking.

It's the same old song Microsoft has been singing for years -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Actually, they probably won't get to the "Extinguish" part with this particular gambit. It's more likely that they'll fail to get EOT standardized, but refuse to support non-DRMed TTF/OTF files, so that it will be harder to use downloadable fonts in a cross-browser way. That is, the designer will have to generate a new font file in EOT format, and then re-generate the same EOT font file for every different domain it's needed on, and finally added a separate IE-only style sheet.

Most sites with modern CSS-based designs already have IE-only style sheets using conditional comments, so adding one more chunk of code there isn't a large resource drain if you're not using multiple domains. But it would be much nicer if they would just support non-DRMed font files that would work wherever. Fat chance of that, though.

Re:Linux users install MS fonts???

[amorsen]

When you buy fonts, the higher-quality ones will be in OpenType format with CFF outlines, which is basically TrueType with Type 1 outlines.

True, I was kind of expecting a correction on that one, but I couldn't be bothered to look up the terms. I was hoping the correction would be gentle, and I wasn't disappointed. Thank you!

Did you mean to say...

[mccabem]

here's still the obvious moral issue of DRM, but the proponents of the idea are much more serious than that.

Did you mean to say: "the proponents of the idea aren't serious enough to consider that."

I mean the argument is that "images are too hard" or "not good enough", etc. That may be serious, but only to a "designer". In fact the alternatives are working out just fine in daily use.

If they (the "designers") were really serious, they'd be making noise about banning Flash from similar uses. Isn't the web shiny enough already? ("Yes" in case you even hesitated.)

-Matt

Re:Did you mean to say...

[Samantha Wright]

I meant that they have more grown-up motives than "random, cutesy, difficult to read fonts." Sorry.

Font embedding is a good thing

[wazzzup]

While I am against Microsoft's vision of DRM-laden fonts (the internet is open and free dammit) I welcome the future of font embedding. It would be a huge boon towards a semantic, searchable and accessible web. Designers would have no reason to insert images (or Flash) in place of text order to get the desired typographic effect.

Before you say "HTML is semantic, there is no place for presentation it the spec!" read the actual proposal, it's for the CSS spec, not HTML - right where presentation belongs. Quite frankly, it's silly that this isn't already in place given the rate that we continue to move away from print.

Umm. No.

[TehZorroness]

Let's get one thing strait. You are going to download your fucking font onto my computer then tell me I can only use it in one program/page. How about you take that font and stick it in a hole of your choice.

This isn't DRM - read the spec

[42forty-two42]

There are two issues here, that slashdot combines, and neither of them are DRM. First, characters not used on the page may be dropped from the font to save space - this isn't DRM, just a bandwidth saving measure. This is why the EOT fonts, if subsetted, must be regenerated if your site changed - while it may be annoying, depending on the implementation, there are no restrictions on the renderer, nor is this a required portion of the spec.

Second, there are embedding flags (EOT spec, 4.1). These are essentially a machine-readable copyright and license statement - it is absolutely trivial to manipulate this field. You could do it in a few dozen lines of code in the programming language of your choice, with no need to reverse engineer, drag out keys, whatever.

In short, nothing to see here. This slashdot article makes a big deal out of absolutely nothing.

Re:This isn't DRM - read the spec

[porneL]

Indeed it isn't DRM.

But why Microsoft is pushing it as a solution that protects web foundries' interests!? It makes no sense. It this regard it's no better than TTF.

And you could remove characters from TTF too.

Re:This isn't DRM - read the spec

[42forty-two42]

Because it allows them to express in a clear and concise way what operations they wish to allow on the font - and allows user agents to inform the web developer when they may be infringing upon the copyright. Of course, it's trivially removable, but this avoids the case where someone embeds a font in violation of its license because they didn't realize it was copyrightable.

Re:This isn't DRM - read the spec

[smclean]

Just because some form of copy "protection" is trivial to remove does not make it legal to do so thanks to the DMCA... So how is it not DRM?

Yay! You've reinvented the wheel!

[msimm]

What if I want a fancy title without using an image that screws over scalability (fluid layouts FTW) and screen reading software? Sane font usage could be good for design purposes.

But Scalable Vector Graphics already do that, sans the shitty and unnecessary DRM.

And who's the market here? Doesn't anyone else think it's weird to try to protect /shapes/? Did they also propose a standard for blocking screen captures? Or vision? How ridiculous some peoples fantasies about data protection are.

Re:Yay! You've reinvented the wheel!

[DrSkwid]

Great idea when over 50% of deployed web browsers can't render SVG at all.

Happily?

[msimm]

Happily, it looks to me as though this is going to happen, regardless of whether everyone likes it or not. I'm sure they'll give you a configuration setting to turn off web fonts, though, so you can go on reading Times New Roman and Arial until the end of your days if you'd like.

You mean because the W3C was too stupid or lazy to provide a solution without the ridiculous layer of DRM?

I mean, I get that designers shouldn't be limited to an arbitrary set of 'approved' fonts. But what's the point of adding the proprietary layer on top of the TrueType/Opentype container? Why bring complexity when it clearly can't protect anything?

Re:Happily?

[Selanit]

I beg pardon for the misunderstanding -- I'm not happy about Microsoft's push for cruddy DRM on downloadable fonts. I'm just happy that there's finally some serious effort to make fonts downloadable at all. It's been such a long wait.

But I'd strongly prefer it to happen without any dumb DRM getting tacked on.

rot13 and other substitution cyphers

[cpghost]

Imagine a custom font that displays an 'a' as an 'n', a 'b' as an 'o' etc... (rot13). Then, generate a human-readable page that will still look like total gibberish to search engines. While it may seem silly to do this for whole pages, it could be quite useful for small fragments of a page that should not be (easily) understood by spiders. Encoding email addresses in a spam harvester-resistant way comes to mind as one possible application. Or the same with names of audio and video files...

Re:Linux users install MS fonts???

[QuoteMstr]

In my experience, "light" hinting is a good compromise between the two hinting styles.

an A still stays an A

[freaker_TuC]

With tools available to grep captcha's and break them within the minute this should be no-brainer to ocr those addresses in an alternative way..
I'd say get a webform for this and get first contact through that form; that way you'll not be exposing your e-mail to the world wait web.

You mean compared to a non-existent base?

[msimm]

You've made more a case for SVG then against. But I don't see why fonts can't be embedded and called within websites without trying to force broken (in practice and in spirit) DRM layers over everything.

Microsoft's new publicitary spots

[dukeofgaming]

ISO, W3C, who is next?, yeah... I can see them going with the IEEE to propose another unnecesary standard.

We need more fonts

[Nerdposeur]

Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need.

No. Do a Google search for "School of Design." Look at their websites and portfolios. See how many of them use only the web-safe fonts in their work. (Hint: zero.)

No, you shouldn't use a handwritten script font for paragraph content, even if you could. But the idea that nothing on a page (including headlines) should be anything but the standard web fonts is ludicrous. Currently, headlines are often images to get around that limitation.

More font options would mean the headlines would still look nice, they could be more accessible and scalable, and that you could still look at everything in Arial if you wanted to.

The web is about "give people freedom and let the best browsers/sites/designs emerge," not "limit people to X choices because I know what's best."

Why is no one talking about the economics of fonts

[telbij]

The discussion here sucks. It's driven by design-luddite trolls setting up straw man arguments about why we're better off without font embeddability. Then it's followed up by the standard anti-DRM rhetoric.

Meanwhile nobody is talking about font piracy, which is actually a much huger problem than software, music or movie piracy. Because of the size of the market, size of the files, and the amount of work that goes into creating quality fonts, piracy can have a real detrimental effect on the industry, directly leading to a drastic reduction in new font production.

At /. everyone sees DRM through the lens of some of the terribly crippled and illegal schemes that have come in the past, and the RIAA's hostility towards its customers, running roughshod over fair-use, and disregard for quality in their own products.

But the font industry is another story. One that shows the effects of casual piracy to be very damaging. The idea of some lightweight DRM to prevent casual piracy at least merits consideration (not of the brittle phone-home variety). If copying fonts becomes a simple matter of save as... in any browser, we could enter a world where the font design industry shrivels up and can only come back with a more heavy-handed DRM format just to survive.

Re:Why is no one talking about the economics of fo

[smclean]

in any browser, we could enter a world where the font design industry shrivels up and can only come back with a more heavy-handed DRM format just to survive.

..and as we've learned from iTunes, that will assuredly save the font industry...

Less is a bore

[Serious Callers Only]

You only need 3 fonts.

But which 3?

Georgia (ugh)
Verdana (passable)
Courier (yugh)

If that's the choice, no thanks. Each website/book/whatever only needs 3 fonts, but each person would choose a different 3; that's why we have so many.