Slashdot Mirror
Typography On the Web Gets Different
bstender writes "Most major browsers — including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera — recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and learn more. You'll see three new typefaces — Liza, Auto, and Dolly — used in the body text and headlines."
No doubt the licensing issues are just as complex as the font nerd potential.
That page looked terrible on my PC (with FireFox 3.5)! I can easily see this getting abused.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
I've been waiting for something like this for a while. When I first got into web stuff I was struck by the vast difference between web layout and print layout. Yes, I understand the point about pixel-perfect control being a shackle and how web is supposed to have the flexibility of displaying on different hardware, different browsers, anything from a PDA to a 24" graphic designer screen. I've been bitten by websites that were so strickly formatted that they were unusable outside of their expected use. That being said, I still wanted embeddable fonts. Nice to see we have them now.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I was under the impression that no version of IE supported @font-face?
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/font-face-typekit-and-font-licensing-the-state-of-web-type.ars
For html (webpages) is considered has a bad idea to use the latest technology (with something like CSS as a exception, because was a *HUGE* upgrade).
You write pages that are compatible with standards, that don't break in the mayor browser (firefox and.. *sight* IE), but you have to avoid nice CSS3 features, that are not well supported (like css '3 colums' type of align).
Embeded font is there. Is unusable for a long period of time, maybe 5, maybe 10 years. Once the old browsers are forgothen and the new browsers dominate.
-Woof woof woof!
There was an Ars Technica article that discusses font licensing issues and how they would pour ice water on the potential for @font-face:
Until those issues are resolved, don't expect @font-face to make the Web more than bland.
Now instead of quickly rendered and clearly legible standard fonts, web pages will be burdened with additional downloads, rendering changes, and shitty shitty script and graffiti fonts. I'd like to turn this functionality off, please, and prevent my browser from wasting bandwidth on downloading these fonts... Haven't there also been font-based exploits? No thanks!
Do we need any more?
Hopefully, this will be another nail in the Flash coffin. Now, if they could agree on a codec for the video tag this would be a great year for the web.
Now, I don't know much about CSS. I'm more the "local" person in our security team (as compared to the "remote" gurus sitting some good distance from me. Yes, go ahead, make your jokes). But ... something that downloads something from the internet and pushes it through a browser without asking anyone human first looks a wee bit problematic for me.
Could anyone gimme a hint before I get off my rear and haul the same over those maybe even 30 feet to our remote gurus, so I won't look stupid when I suggest that problem to them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... how long before some hack turns this into an exploit for new self-installing viruses?
Licensing? Nightmare.
Bandwidth? Eek.
Security? Whoa!
Compatibility? Doesn't downgrade nicely (that page looks horrible in a "stable" browser of today and is almost unreadable)
Gains? Geocities-like webpages that use every font they can just for the sake of it. Seven million websites written in Comic Sans. And only the sensible browsers will come with options to turn the damn thing off (and thus look even worse).
Stupid idea, stupid execution (having to DOWNLOAD every font mentioned on a page?)
Great. Now bugs in the font rendering engine will lead to remote exploits just by visiting a malicious web page.
Someone should set up a central font repository to make it easier to replace a font with something malicious.
... and web browsers can easily be set to ignore.
The average "Web developer" knows nothing about type, and thinks "kearning" is something you do to corn on the cob. Read a whole essay in Trainwreck Bold Oblique? No thanks.
kulakovich
I can easily see this getting abused.
Your prediction need only look back on UI technologies like Flash to realize that there will certainly be some of an "artistic" nature that will be enabled by this new technology to make their page look like this. Don't get me wrong, I love !!! and their music. And I find the site amusing. Horrendously confusing (you'll notice you can interact with those things) but a common occurrence among bands to take Flash to a level it's not supposed to go.
.swf file. At least the browser will be able to show you something if you don't have the ability/desire to render it.
And I welcome it. Seriously, I'd rather have this be a well formed completely open standard in CSS and allow the creative types a way to vent and put tattoo or gothic or whatever font all over their page. At least I won't need a plugin. At least it won't be in some weird
I'm not going to start using this until everything's ironed out and your average web surfer finds it not only acceptable but desirable. But I still am excited that CSS and HTML are meeting needs. With IE6 soon dead, they are liberated.
People will abuse the tools you give them. If you don't believe me, go visit the graveyard that is Geocities. Doesn't stop the rest of us from using the tools in the way they were meant to be used. You might have an argument about this exacerbating the issue with these latest tools but I've always been one to promote unbridled liberation on the web.
My work here is dung.
One of the concepts behind CSS is to abstract content from how it is presented. But one of the objectives behind this is to make presentations more self consistent. You change one css rule and all the logical kinds of content it applies to all change. this facilitiates accessibility and comprehension of a documents logical layout by the reader.
presumably the latter desiderata is the real goal, not pretty looking documents.
given that, there is a large benefit to users if web pages look a lot alike. it puts less burden on the end user to decipher the page and access it's content if qualtiatively different authors web pages dont differ from each other in too many ways.
I know some css nerds will tell me if I feel that way I should use my own css. first off I don't have time for that. second, it's likely if I mess with CSS on an overly tuned web page i;ll make it less readable not more.
SO the problem with this is not that it's a perfectly awful idea but that like blink, if you include this as an easy to use feature it will get abused to death and in aggregate crapify the web.
get off my lawn.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yargg! I don't WANT more PRESENTATION oriented stuff in the browser/standards.
Chances are if a web site thinks a font set / size is a good idea, I probably won't like it at all.
My eyes aren't the greatest, and I like to use MY OWN font selections, and LARGE ones,
preferably with a custom / sane color & background scheme too.
Nor do I want more BLOAT making page loads EVEN SLOWER so I can pull down a few hundred K of some random fonts someone thinks are cute but which I find annoying and unreadable.
What's next, embedding PDF files so the sites can have complete control over the rendering?
How about devoting the same amount of attention to, say, something USEFUL like SEMANTIC mark up
and informational SCHEMAs so the user's browser / application can actually easily find the INFORMATION the user wants, and their local browser can figure out how to PRESENT that information according to the USER'S PREFERENCES.
Pet peeve: sites that use formatting so that when you zoom in to the site text, it doesn't just re-wrap to fix into whatever horizontal space you have available, but actually just zooms off the right edge of the screen so you can't use that large of a font size / zoom without also using horizontal scrolling to see what just got shoved past the edge of the screen instead of wrapping to fit as it should. Thanks, slashdot, et. al. Take something that WORKS in "plain simple" HTML and break it with overzealous use of style sheets and enforced "we know what you want better than you do" formatting / layout.
Why do we want remote sites to have even more ability and tendency to load hundreds of K of crap onto our browsers? This can't be a good thing for things like netbooks, kindle, iphone, blackberry, laptops, et. al. where the system default fonts are probably really BEST for that system's unique display size / type. Do things that make the web work BETTER ubiquitously across browsers, platforms, not things that are intended to favor desktop PCs with high res displays and english/latin/western type languages, et. al. and make everything else worse.
Once again, the form versus function debate ...
Apparently, there are some out there who feel that words alone are not enough; they need a particular font to convey emotion or a particular feel.
I just hope that any browser that supports this makes it optional, and I can turn off the downloading altogether.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it sounds like it's a great candidate for some security exploits.
I'll be watching ./ for a headline indicating someone found a buffer overrun and managed to turn this into yet another security hole.
I use Lynx!
VT100 24 lines by 80 characters (or 132)...the way God intended the web to be seen
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
In about:config, set gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false and restart the browser.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Yes, we do need more fonts, but we need semantic ones. This is the entirely wrong way to go about it.
As anyone who's looked at their (good) browser's settings knows, the web supports standard "semantic" or functional font specifications, like sans, sans-serif, and cursive. You can assign these to things like Arial, Times, and Isabella or whatever cursive font you want.
The web page in the example really has no place specifying the exact font which should be used, as people with visual impairments, people with low-res portable devices, or people whose native language isn't based on a latin script, might have extreme difficulty reading it. However, if you specify that the title is to be in a cursive font, then browsers could simply ship with nice cursive font settings by default. This would allow pages to look good in the device in question, but also be fully configurable --- including for those art-nuts who care to pay to have the very best of fonts and displays.
However, the idea has not been taken far enough. Besides sans, sans-serif, and cursive, we could use lots of extra "semantic" font names like fantasy, futuristic, etc.
It's like Type3 fonts in Postscript. Just make a custom font with the glyphs permutated a bit, transform the text accordingly, and hey presto, copy is worthless. Or how about having complete paaragraphs or pages in a single glyph?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Oh boy, this can't be good. I could really see this being used maliciously.
Wasn't this already possible years ago? I seem to remember seeing LOTS about it back in 2001 or so, including way too complex issues like how to encode the data, and how many glyphs could be included due to licensing restrictions. It was my understanding that people simply ignored it because it was a crap (and overcomplicated) idea.
I have no problem with this as long as I can continue to override the font selection and minimum size to something I want.
That, by the way, is great, and more people should try it. Every web page is consistent because every page has the same, easy-to-read type, with a minimum size that puts no strain on my eyes. And very, very few sites break if you do this now that most use CSS - I haven't actually encountered a sites that breaks in a long time. Add adblock and flashblock, and you have a very clean, consistent surfing experience.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
...are just a way of sharing information. I think the <video> tag is a great idea, since it moves towards a standardised way to view videos on a page. Even though it's video, it's still information.
This, however, is not a clever way of "enhancing" web pages. We have the information we need, and we're satisfied. No need to put bells and whistles on it. If it were up to me (which it isn't), there would be no such thing as "web design". Web pages are not a fashion show, they're just means of sharing, displaying and publishing information. Let's keep it that way.
The sample page looks great, in Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 anyway. Those dingbats don't look particularly good, but I don't know if that's what the font itself looks like or if they aren't rendering properly. The page does take a bit longer to load, but once it's loaded I don't see problems.
I recall back in college, over 10 years ago now, hearing about custom web fonts. I even played with it a few times, but that went out the window when the type foundries all freaked out. It certainly is encouraging not to have to be dependent on Flash if I want custom fonts, however, I have my reservations. I'll have to see how this works going forward.
The one downside with this ability, however, if that we're going to have people going absolutely nuts with fonts. If you thought MySpace pages looked like crap, wait until people start using crazy, illegible fonts.
I use my own custom CSS rules to replace the fonts specified by Web developers with my own preferred font (Times New Roman).
I'd love to see flash go away since I don't like having to run executables just to present content.
But I'm wondering here if fonts contain executables. I know emprically, that putting in some font packages in my computer also puts in some DLLs or runs some executables. I've never been quite clear if fonts necessarily are always simply data that describes the font face or if the specification of the font can optionally contain executable in how it gets rendered.
if so then will that be the case here as well?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At least my browser still respects "ignore site fonts and use those I specify". I guess this mess is progress?
IE does not support the W3C spec for embedding fonts. Like everything else in IE land (see IE Javascript Filters) they have their own proprietary method of embedding fonts.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
You were able to do this ten years ago, but it never took off because of the licensing issues with fonts.
You think the RIAA is bad? Font foundries make them look like girl scouts.
Yeah, the web went downhill back when they started embedding images in the pages. Who, I mean, who would want to see GRAPHICS in the middle of your CLEAN, SEMANTIC INFORMATION? It doesn't WORK and it's an OUTRAGE!
So what's the deal with "typekit"?
Their blog grandly announces (or at least strongly implies) that they've solved the licensing/theft/etc problems with downloadable fonts, without using DRM, but while there's a lot of handwaving, they don't actually seem to go into any detail about how they've "solved" it.
Does anybody know?
We live, as we dream -- alone....
First off, CSS is not the "latest technology" by any means. Limited support for CSS appeared as early as IE3 and Netscape 4.x, and by the time IE5 was released, all of its contemporaries (Opera et al) had some kind of CSS implementation. Sure it was inconsistent across browsers and a bit buggy, but it was a hell of a lot better than font tags.
Secondly, the advantage of CSS, if used correctly, is that bleeding edge features that are not available on all browsers at least have a way of degrading gracefully. Sure, one browser out there can't import your whiz-bang new font right now, but if it degrades to the next best thing and does not suffer with usability, then I don't see why you should "have to avoid" these features.
CSS is well over 10 years old now. Sure, CSS2 came along a couple of years after CSS1, and they're just now starting to agree on CSS2.1 and CSS3. By 2005, most web development classes and best practices on the job stated that font tags were going the way of the dodo bird and to start using CSS. If we went by your schedule of "don't even think about using it until 5 or 10 years after it's released" we'd still be using font tags.
You *like* Times New Roman on the screen? Are you mad?
Serif fonts belong on dead trees.
no@font-face
...can now bugger up pages in even more ways that will make them hard to read and cause them to render incorrectly for those of us who cannot read 2 point type.
Not to mention even slower to load.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why?
Why is font licensing any different from image licensing? The page directs you to (optionally) download font information. Your computer either does or does not. If it does, it uses the font information to render something on the page. As the server gave you this information when your computer asked for it, you legitimately have a copy. However, you are not allowed to redistribute this copy to a third party unless you have a license to do so, else you are in breach of copyright.
It's just a bunch more bits that you've downloaded off of a server. How are these bits any different from any other bits?
(Is there a missing href in the story?)
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
What was the tech used to convert photos to black and white pseudo-pen-and-ink pictures used on that page for the author's pictures?
Advice: on VPS providers
I should know - I used to do it for a living. However, they are easily stolen, and fonts that once cost serious bucks are now (essentially) free. Which is why I don't do it for a living anymore. But I'm not discussing that - what I am pointing at is if you can embed fonts in a page, it is a trivial exercise to open a font, "clean" the points (creating a new drawing of the font), and then export the thing with a new name. So, you could take Arial, fry it up, and come out with Ariel. Now someone might notice something fishy about Ariel, noting it similarity to Arial. In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright. Only the software that is the font file itself. This is what torpedoed the type industry back in the mid 1990s, in Adobe vs SSI (?) case in Florida.
Sure, SSI got sued by Adobe for this, but that was pre-www - back in the day of centralised font distribution systems on floppies or CDs. MS or Adobe would have to chase down thousands of people with take-down notices. The FROEI (financial return on energy invested) would be microscopic and an endless battle due to variations in international laws.
Another strategy would be DRM. This would work on new DRM fonts, but there are literally tens of thousands of older fonts (from ancient PostScript to TrueType to newer OpenType) that are not DRM'd and they would be all over the place, effectively smothering any DRM font system.
Flash was developed initially as an animation system, but quickly it became obvious that it opened up font use, even if the test is not animated. Flash has its own and deeply obvious problems, and I look forward to its death. That said, at the time it served a useful purpose. With AJAX and now font-face, I don't see much future for Flash at all, outside of its original use as an animation engine.
I'm of mixed feelings on this - as I noted, a good font is hard to make. However, the basic digital fonts were developed way back in the 1980s and early 1990s and have only been updated for new technology (unicode, opentype, etc.) and one would think that there is little point to grinding more and more out of them, except in terms of petty greed. If Adobe had their way, we never would have seen TrueType and you would have to pay $100 for every typeface and each would have to be installed on only your machine. Of course, it would look very good. If MS had their way, everything would be TrueType and you could only use the fonts that come installed with the OS, and any extra would be excluded at the OS level... and they would all suck. So, the piracy of the 1990s (fueled by the ancient Titan and venerable program, Fontographer) led to an explosion of fonts. Most of them craptastic, but a true example of digital creativity. Some/Many were obvious rip-offs, but their hinting was often crap - delta hints were almost always missing, their letterspacing worse, and the kerning either atrocious or non-existent.
Tools, including Fontographer (resurrected by FontLab, bless their hearts) have improved since 1993, and so have "amateur" fonts. However, the market for fonts is still very poor as the saturation level increases daily.
Net result? If MS adopts @font-face for IE, game over (in a good way), and we will see a flowering of online type design. If MS drags its heels on this, @font-face could die on the vine, and we'll be stuck with Arial, for a VERY long time.
So, here's hoping @font-face spreads like crazy, and we can finally get some decent looking pages going...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Web pages should let the user select how it looks. That's why it was created.
If you want control over the exact layout of a page, use PDF.
As I get older and don't see as well, I love that I can change the size and flow of text on a web page. Web sites that don't let me control that, don't get my eyes.
As a designer, your idea of "kewl" isn't necessarily my idea of "cool" and useful. Seems allowing the end user to control that would be good? Perhaps?
I just don't know how to feel about this.
More DRM in the world == bad.
Less Flash in the world == good.
But *without* DRM, this would give us... more web pages with less content and more "design"... ugh.
Oh, well, anything that keeps those annoying web designers out of *my* face will be fine, I guess.
All characters are blank.
Slashdotters are happy with their Windows machines, it seems.
... it goes like this: "it's as useful as a goiter". Sums it up quite well, I think.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I for one would find it very useful, for embedding things like sexagesimal numerals, e.g http://autonomyseries.com/autonomy-canon/community-standard-sexagesimal/ right now uses an aging wordpress plugin to display sexagesimal.ttf glyphs. Being able to embed "@font=sexagesimal.ttf" (or whatever the syntax is) would be very handy, but not if we're forced to convert our ttfs to Microsoft's worthless alternative format.
As for Microsoft's pathetic excuse that someone, somewhere might violate a copyright at some point in time my response is: so what? Just because someone, somewhere might violate someone's asinine copyright on a particular implementation of the alphabet's 26 letters, doesn't mean monopolists like Microsoft have any business throwing roadblocks in the way of the rest of us, who design our own fonts and want to be able to display and distribute them simply, seamlessly, and painlessly in standard, open formats. This isn't about protecting copyrights on fonts, its about Microsoft making sure IE isn't quite compatible with every other browser, and making sure we have to use their tools if we want anything to work on their dominant platform (and, if history is anything to judge by, eventually buy a license to do so). It's about muscling in on web standards to the detriment of everyone else, and I for one am fed up with it. I'm delighted Firefox, Opera, and Apple are embracing this. Hopefully they'll do the same with ogg-vorbis and other open standards, so we can have a complete web stack (including fonts and multimedia) that is unencumbered by American software patents, Microsoft (or anyone else's) proprietaryisms, sometimes-expensive licensing of third party products, and proprietary formats that only run on one or two widespread platforms.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
In the '80s those of us not using English had a real problem with fonts in that we had no uniform way of having what we wrote appear on a screen or printer. I remember embedding printer control escape sequences that would back the print head up and then print a slash or tick over what was there so people could understand what letter it was. But even back then people were complaining about not having fancy fonts when there was this real problem. Remember font cartridges for printers?
Now the real problem is largely solved but these font weenies are still coming-up with crazy schemes to make text look a certain particular way and it is pretty ridiculous the amount of effort that has been spent over the years on this with schemes that end-up only working for a few short years before something new shows-up on the horizone when for the most part electronic text is about information rather than the appearance. Don't try and tell me that this is simple until you look up EOT.
Web pages should let the user select how it looks. That's why it was created.
Which is why you can ALREADY tell the browser to ignore font requests from the page, and have been able to since, oh, some time around the release of NCSA Mosaic 0.9...
nature of exploit:
attacker can cause severe psychological damage to user by gaining access to repressed childhood memories from GeoCities in the 90's.
weinersmith
Let me ask something as you got GNU mail.
Isn't truetype a patent hell? So, what is the point of using TTF and messing up entire video element by "h264 has patents" argument?
I mean, as far as I know, postscript format (.ps) is chosen by X11 because of its multi platform nature and also not being a patent hell. Isn't that the reason? So why wasn't a .ps.gz preferred?
I really wonder freetype people's view about as they still have to offer -hinting as a separate option. Funny thing is, OS X, coming from a company who has been one of the reasons of that comedy comes with freetype.
Let me remind you something. IE 6 was -once- the king of the web remember? With ridiculous market share easily nearing windows market share. There were millions of sites "best (only) viewed in IE" actually meaning you wouldn't even dare to enter the sites without masking as IE. So, for that idiot webmaster, compatibility is no issue. Guy makes a IE document rather than a HTML.
Guess what? IE 4+ has font embedding technology. It wasn't the compatibility or support issue. It is basically they don't care enough.
People around you sometimes buy shareware for $25 which duplicates their OS functionality in a better way yes? Seen anyone buying a font just because it looks better or reads better? They are around same price too. Why they don't buy? They are easy to install too, just double click in any OS. Oh, did I mention they are also multi platform down to handhelds?
When I tried to buy a font for Symbian since Nokia's one is really irritating, people laughed at me. They now buy trivial 'apps' for dollar each.
You better report it to Apple via http://bugreporter.apple.com/
Why? Because these days, a browser "crash" especially dealing with an object also means a potential attack vector. As it is repeatable, you shouldn't hesitate.
This is exactly how Microsoft can stop progress of web and in fact, the entire progress in computer/software industry.
Once they don't support something or support it in a way that is impossible to implement in other platforms, that thing is dead.
Don't hold your breath for them to support a multi platform way of doing things. That is how every webmaster ended up using Flash for drop down menus and also the reason why they hate Flash enough to ship a 'me too' joke.
I still think this can only improve your situation. As you said, you can use your own CSS, or none at all (in FireFox: View > Page Style > No Style). You may be too lazy to change it, but at least you'll have the option.
People already use non-standard fonts on web pages. They just use images or Flash or whatever, which gives the user zero control over appearance.
Additional benefits: since these wacky fonts will be sent as actual text, you'll still be able to Control+F search them, resize them, index them with a search engine, or have them read to you if you're blind.
One of firefox most important features, which keeps me completely locked in because the competition doesn't have it: the ability to set fonts I like and forbit sites from changing it. My entire web experience is all in one font and it's all big enough to read. Opera and Chrome are completely ruled out for not having this.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I would love to look at the fonts, but that craigmod page crashed Safari (4.0.2) three times in a row. It looks like the font-face is definitively the reason for the crashes (the thread crashed on WebCore::FontCache::getFontData). I guess on the bright side I now know how to reliably crash Safari.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
It worked fine here. Safari Version 4.0.2 (5530.19), MacOS X 10.5.7. However, like you said, it showed nothing until the fonts were downloaded. At least in FireFox3.5, it showed the text using generic fonts until the special fonts downloaded and loaded, though this did make reading the text a bit jarring until all of the fonts loaded.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Loaded into rendering code? I hope this is well-sandboxed! I see nothing about the context in which these are loaded.
I fear this could be a way to load more nasties on yer little incubator.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
That statement can be said about every technology a web developer can use.
You are whining.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Anyone watch the "Helvetica" documentary? Will the web become the new battleground for the modernists versus post modernists? Must millions more die on the bloody altar of typographic expression versus clarity of presentation? Peace, my brothers and sisters of the glyphic arts. We should not fight, for we must unite and stand against the common enemy to us all: Comic Sans MS.
I wish the tag still worked, it would go really well with custom fonts.
You can do a text search on a graphic?
Fuck your good with these new fangled computing devices!
All hail the new king. For your next trick, how about curing cancer - without charging of course.
From the Slashdot post:
> (...) latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera - recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face
From the linked page viewed in IE7:
> "This demo appears as intended only in Firefox 3.5"
The demo page shows the issue so clearly: You forgot IE. IE8 still doesn't have font-face support for TTF which is possibly the only format people will like to use.
I work with CSS most of my day but I doubt that I will have the pleasure of setting up sites with custom fonts for several years to come with the release cycles and popularity of IE as we have it today. For now we can be happy that IE8 can actually pass the acid2 test.
Regards
Seph
I couldn't get any font format to work on latest Chromium or Iron. What's the deal with that? Do I need to copy over some DLLs from a Chrome install, as for video?
To convert TTF to that weird Microsoft EOT format, ttf2eot works fine and is dead simple to use. What do I use to convert between OTF and TTF? Someone told me to just rename the file as they're very similar, but that didn't work.
I welcome the addition and support for this. As a "front end" developer I get all kinds of requests for non-standard fonts to be used. They pay the bills so we do it; all as images. Changing a site from one color to another requires reworking dozens to hundreds of images. If all I have to do is embed their dumb fonts, I can go back to complaining about their color choices instead of mountains of work it'll cause me ;)
I just checked the demo page in Opera 9.52 and IE 6. Both rendered ugly unreadable hash, neither displayed the intended fonts. Hard fail. Sure, it's the Bad Browser Makers fault, but that means zip point zero to a professional designer / maintainer.
Font creators want a comically bad permission scheme to use their fonts. Since there's no standard in place and no implementation in place, that effectively means that every font foundry is going to go out of business trying to sell their offline-only fonts to people who can't use them where they really want to. Mark Pilgrim has it right: Fuck the Foundries.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright. Only the software that is the font file itself.
However, you can get a design patent on the design of a font. It doesn't last forever like copyright would, but it's pretty strong protection for your design.
Typography is a dying craft; anything that can be done to revive it should be applauded.
In these times there are very few that are prepared to uphold the standards that were created and refined by the past-masters of the print trade. Amongst the best of these are the artisans at http://hosanna1.com/ Breathtaking.
And by the time of the release of NCSA Mosaic 0.91 web designers had figured out how to bungle pages in such a way as to cause them to be garbled when viewed with the "wrong" font.
People had figured that out by the late '70s, but it wasn't measured in any standard way until the creation of the Indent-o-Meter in the early '90s.
cliffs: get off my lawn.
Yay, now we can design with Papyrus! http://xkcd.com/590/
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
No, you've missed the point.
The current situation, if you wanted a stylized block of text, it had to be a graphic--which can't be searched, screen-read, or indexed. In short, the text and the presentation are stuck together.
With the new font-face concept, you now have the text in the source (which CAN be searched, indexed, and read by a screen-reader) and the presentation controlled by the CSS. So I guess, yes, you can get features that previously required a graphic, but now allow text-search, too.
The way the law works in most jurisdictions is that fonts themselves are governed by copyright, but that texts set in that font are not affected by its copyright. The rationale is that that's the whole point of fonts. However, this is self-contradictory, since any substantial text contains enough information to reconstruct the font. Now, in the paper world this was sufficiently cumbersome that only font companies could reasonably do this and they watched each other. That didn't prevent look-alikes and close almost clones of course, but that's another story.
However in the digital world, the actual font file is distributed along with the text. You now have the right to copy a text set in a font, if the copyright holder of the text allows you to, in that font even if you don't have a license for it, and make any changes you wish, but at the same time you don't. And both systems if applied consistently are wrong. For certain artistic works the fonts may contribute so much to the mood or affect the document in some other way that not being able to copy the font would essentially infect the document with the copyright of the font, which is exactly what you don't want. On the other hand, the font designers need to make a living and currently copyright is the only protection fonts have. There's a special page in the copyright act for fonts and it just reads: "Here be dragons."
Of course these problems don't appear if you just use free fonts, or if you hold the rights for both the text and the font, I hope.
Microsoft's reason for this was because some people make TrueType font files and put them under copywrite
PROTIP: "Copywrite" means to create text for an advertisement; "copyright" means exclusive rights in a work of authorship. Using "copywrite" to mean "copyright" shows that you haven't read the copyright law.
Fonts do not contain executable code.
TrueType fonts contain bytecode for a virtual machine that processes "hints" on how to make glyphs more readable at low resolutions. Some FreeType installations on Linux ignore these hints to work around an Apple patent, but the original TrueType implementations of Windows and classic Mac OS execute them in some sort of sandbox.
Here are a couple of proof-of-concepts... (obviously you need a compliant browser to view this)
http://www.ambor.com/hb/webdice.html
http://www.ambor.com/hb/webharveyballs.html
Custom fonts on web pages were possible 10 years ago.
Someone is trying to squeeze money out of an old technology that was not used too much.
I wonder why Ctrl+F doesn't search alt text.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF