Slashdot Mirror
Font Foundries Opening Up To the Web
Tiger4 writes "A huge number of fonts are migrating from the print-only world to the Web. As the browser manufacturers get on board, the WWW will be a much more interesting place (see the article illustration). 'Beginning Tuesday, Monotype Imaging, a Massachusetts company that owns one of the largest collections of typefaces in the world, is making 2,000 of its fonts available to Web designers. The move follows that of San Francisco-based FontShop, which put several hundred of its fonts online in February. In just a few weeks, Font Bureau, a Boston designer of fonts, will make some of its typefaces available online as well.' With any luck, the transition period to font-richness will be briefer and less painful than the waving-flag, jumping-smiley, flashing-text era HTML explosion."
...we really just need one less.
How many fonts do you need?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
waving-flag, jumping-smiley, flashing-text era HTML explosion
What about scrolling marquees and animated "under construction" GIFs, you insensitive clod!
Living With a Nerd
More websites that look like ransom notes.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
We got into the current mess of text in images because Microsoft wouldn't support Mozilla's font files. Is IE going with the standard this time around, or do we have another browser incompatibility issue?
I thought I was going to visit the site of a Bank in South America called "Banco Micsans"
At least they aren't offering expert sex changes
So fonts cost so much?
The article is vague on what, if anything, is being done to address the important issues that have been impeding a wider selection of fonts being used on web pages, namely:
1. Lack of browser support for downloading fonts (CSS @font-face and friends; see @font-face: The Potential of Web Typography, which will also show you if your browser supports the technology they use)
2. Restrictive licenses that do not allow making fonts available
Both of these means that, when making a web page, you are limited to what fonts the viewer has available.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
People will still use Comic Sans.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
"In other words, a seventh-grader writing a book report on Microsoft Word had more font choices than the person designing Esquire Magazine's website or the IKEA online catalog."
Which is probably why the average seventh-grader's book report looks so terrible and the websites in question look (most probably, haven't seen them) quite sensibly austere. Sometimes choice hurts if the user doesn't know the first thing about design.
Ezekiel 23:20
This sounds like just what I need: more 100KB unanticipated downloads while I'm stuck at the end of an unreliable slow cellular modem connection. What ever happened to using the web to deliver information instead of "art"? At least browsers can ignore the new font specifications and still display something useful, unlike what happens with high-fashion websites implemented entirely in Flash. As we know, "Flash home page" == "Hold on to your wallet". Will it be the same for fancy fonts, too?
all font related articles on /. will use Papyrus.
Every website in the world uses Verdana.
Or, at least they do on my computer. Who cares what a web designer thinks looks good, I just want the text to be legible.
So let's see here. Web designers may get a bunch of fonts, but...
;)
what use are they if they are not installed on the user's macine?
This is why every page still uses the Arial/Helvetica/Times/Verdana mixmash. You aren't going to be able to see a site in any other font unless you have that font installed. And who is going to manually install a font pack? Not that it is terribly inconvenient to install fonts, but it is nice when your browser or Web platform does this automatically as it is typically the only real path to adoption in a lot of Web scenarios. It would be awfully nice if font installation were some magical hidden feature in HTML5.
I gave up a long time ago waiting on browsers to support this font and that font... now i just embed them with flash using sIFR -> http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr
Maybe my visual cortex is different from everyone else on the web. But I just don't get the font thing. Maybe it is like color blindness - font blindness?
Apart from recognizable trademark-style fonts that people use for a title page or a logo (Coca-cola, Snickers, Pacman) - do most people even care what font they are looking at? The number of fonts I have to select from is already darned annoying. I'm on a fresh Windows 7, and the list goes off the bottom of the screen. I don't think I can even tell the difference between most of them without a side-by-side comparison.
I think I need 3 fonts to get along just fine: 1 serif proportional, 1 sans serif proportional, 1 fixed-width. I really don't want my computer to start downloading and caching a gigabyte fonts because this web site designer thought Garamond expressed their idea better when I already downloaded Bookman, Century, Baskerville, Bodini, Times Roman, ...
I must have completely missed it, but... what exactly would "Mozilla's font files" entail?
Google is mostly returning the WOFF bits and pieces now, so I'm not entirely sure what to search for, there.
T hi s wi l l n oT eN d wEL l Welcome back to mid 90's-era "font-itis"
The Digital Sorceress
...I can still let my browser render all websites with only 1 font and don't get a fucked up layout. If we are really lucky, there's a good font inside these packages to render math in a nice and readable way.
So, fonts are expensive because it's VERY hard to make good ones.
That and all the font creation software that runs natively under popular desktop operating systems costs a significant chunk of change. Sure, you can try FontForge, but installing Cygwin to run that is a pain in the behind.
I gave up a long time ago waiting on browsers to support this font and that font... now i just embed them with flash using sIFR
From sIFR's manual:
From adobe.com:
So I see sIFR as appropriate for sufficiently large commercial web sites (which can claim a copy of Flash as a business expense) but not for personal or otherwise non-commercial web sites.
More stuff to filter with AdBlock+, thanks for pointing this out.
Apart from recognizable trademark-style fonts that people use for a title page or a logo (Coca-cola, Snickers, Pacman) - do most people even care what font they are looking at?
Yes, because web sites want their headlines to appear in the appropriate trade dress fonts. For example, a site about Precious Moments figurines would want to use the font Wasted Collection for headlines, and a site about Animal Crossing video games would want to use Fink Heavy.
Because creating a *complete* font that looks good is a lot of work.
It's a rare and extraordinary craft.
Consider these Five Classic Type Faces from a Cooper Union introduction to typeface design:
Garamond: French. Old Style. 1617
Baskerville: English. Transitional. 1757.
Bodoni: Italian. Modern. 1780.
Century: American. "Egyptian." 1894.
Helvetica: Swiss. Contemporary. 1957.
nnooooooooooo <huh> ooooooooo-ooooooohh.
A veritable font of information.
On one hand, as a fan of typography, I'm happy to see that this gives talented web designers a powerful tool for clearer and more aesthetically pleasing display of information. On the other hand, there are still a lot of untalented web designers around and it's more crap to download just to display a page. Whether the experience will be positive or negative will depend mainly on the size of the truck you have hauling your internet.
That is all.
Fonts are often taken for granted. People don't seem to realize how expensive fonts can get.
http://www.adobe.com/type/ - have a look around, some font sets are around 100 dollars a font, a bunch are pushing 400 and some of the most elegant script fonts hit well above 1,000 USD per font family... easy. Either way, when you tally them all up (who can live with just one or two), it's possible the most expensive treasure of print shops aren't their expensive Heidelberg presses but their vast fonts collection they are licensed to use in print and publication.
The numbers of fonts needed... by artists and professionals? Well, to gain a perspective... how many of them for free do you have on your computer? Printing departments have thousands of full font collections (condensed, bold, italic etc).
So when new fonts are made available for cheap/free, especially a full family of a given typeface, I am grateful even if the font is so-so. The Open Source community could benefit largely by being nice to budding typographers, this is for sure.
Has anybody noticed that the fonts reside on Monotype's servers and the user's browser needs to go fetch them, and unlike all the standard browser fonts, these require a licence in order to use. The licence is currently free, however that doesn't mean it won't be $100,000 tomorrow.
And if their server goes down or you decide you don't want to pay, your site looks like crap.
Pardon my scepticism, but I'll stick to fonts that exist in the browser or even better CSS @font-face and download a freely distributable font from the client's site.
The part that's astonishing is that there are still companies that charge money for fonts. Why (how) are they still here?
The font designers couldn't work with web technologies until recently. New AMD processors are finally hot enough to melt lead.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
the disabled. One of the best reasons for using web-fonts is the corresponding removal of text content from images, which were done to work around the lack of good web fonts. Search engines will also be a bit more accurate, so in a sense everybody wins.
obligatory link
Now it can help slow down my browser even more, as if googleanalytics and fsdn and other third parties weren't enough.
Having a fast connection doesn't mean squat if my browser has to connect to a dozen different servers just to render a page. If one of them is slow, it kinds defeats the goal of having a fast pipe.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Because designers know that it costs time and energy to make a good font, and want to show respect for that. You really shouldn't get riled up about typography without learning about it first from the perspective of the people who actually do it.
Because generally speaking, free fonts are crap: They often don't come with lower case numerals, proper small-caps, decent contextual ligature support, multiple weights, properly prepared bold, oblique, and bold-oblique forms, proper hinting at small sizes, and variations of different optical sizes. All of which SOMEONE has to come up with, and properly implement. And that person/people SHOULD be paid for the insane amount of work required to prepare even the basic latin alphabet in all these variations, let alone implementing decent unicode support...
There are only a couple of good fonts, the rest doesn't render well at small sizes without antialiasing.
WOFF is the answer to both questions. It is an open font format that allows browsers to download the font on demand, and all the browsers have committed to supporting it in their next release. It has no DRM, but since it isn't the same format as operating systems use, and the browser will be downloading it to a temporary directory behind the scenes, most users won't know that it is possible to copy the fonts - most don't even know how to install a TTF when you give it to them. The foundries have decided that being too restrictive about the use of fonts means that no one will use them, and have pretty much unanimously decided to support the WOFF format - which is what this article is about with all the tech info filtered out.
This article has more info.
That a WYSIGYG thingie?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
No, the real reason that fonts are expensive is because they could only be forged out of mithril by Dwarven master-smiths skilled in the arcane runic arts. These Dwarven master-smiths ceaselessly toil day and night, hammering the fonts with their ancient mithril hammers under extreme heat of the volcanic furnaces of their underground font foundries. Only after at least a decade of smithing will the Dwarves deem a font fit to be traded for gold. So, if you ever hear thunder or lightning around mountains, it is actually the hammering and sparks from the Dwarven font foundries. The end.
The Monotype approach to web fonts shows the pain of the latest DRM scheme. You don't just embed their fonts. You have to register with their site, create a "project", associate your domains with the "project", specify which fonts you want to use (only some are free), specify to their web site which font goes with which CSS element, and put some of their Javascript on your site. Only then will their fonts work, and they're served from their servers.
One implication is that pages using their fonts will not archive properly. Another is that if their font servers are slow, so are your pages. And editing will be a pain; WYSISWYG editors may not display these fonts properly. (One would hope Adobe would get this right in Dreamweaver, but they'll probably try to tie Dreamweaver to some Adobe font system.)
Your ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your (prefectly kerned Helvetica) newsletter.
They often don't come with lower case numerals, proper small-caps, decent contextual ligature support, multiple weights, properly prepared bold, oblique, and bold-oblique forms, proper hinting at small sizes, and variations of different optical sizes. All of which SOMEONE has to come up with
They dont HAVE to. We could easily do without all that.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Because designers know that it costs time and energy to make a good font, and want to show respect for that. You really shouldn't get riled up about typography without learning about it first from the perspective of the people who actually do it.
Hmmm. Where have I seen other software that's works beautifully, was written by skilled people and is free?
<cough>Slashdot</cough><cough>Postfix</cough><cough>Linux</cough>
By your reasoning, software shouldn't be free either.
For the same reason that there are still companies that charge money for porn.
Free, plentiful, good. Pick any two.
Sounds like the "open source software is just for hobbyist" argument.
If free fonts are crap, that just means that the "free-model" hasn't yet taken hold in font design, or that no one is really that interested in fonts.
There are plenty of free things of high quality that are ridiculously more complex than fonts. An operating system kernel for one.
In all fairness most of the commercial fonts I've seen have pretty poor Unicode support.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
and unlike all the standard browser fonts, these require a licence in order to use.
The "standard" fonts also require a license. It's just that the license has been paid for by your OS vendor.
... and then they built the supercollider.
There is always a catch somewhere. This time its in clause 4 of the license agreement.
This also gives Monotype Imaging the right to invoke an ad unit to be placed on each web page that uses our Web Font Software,
Doesn't say it what will be an ad for....
There are plenty of things that are really hard to do and that not a lot of people can do that are still worthless. Scarcity of labor is only necessary but not sufficient for high prices.
There are tons of people obsessed with typography who can design good fonts. And there are plenty of "well-designed" fonts that don't cost much.
Even the notion of what constitutes a "good" font are based in style and fashion; a lot of typographic rules have no rational basis, they just reflect a cultural preference, despite all the hogwash and technobabble typographic designers use.
"Good" fonts are expensive not for any intrinsic quality, but simply because they represent a brand and identity.
$ grep -C4 font-family userContent.css
/* FONT {
/* OK, undo the damage for <pre>. */
BODY {
padding: 8px 8px;
font-family: serif !important;
}
--
* {
font-size: 100% !important;
line-height: normal !important;
font-family: serif !important;
}
--
* color: inherit !important;
* background: inherit !important;
* font-family: inherit !important;
* font-size: inherit !important;
* }
*/
--
PRE, TT, CODE {
font-family: monospace !important;
}
--
H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 {
font-weight: bold !important;
font-family: sans-serif !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
padding-bottom: 0.25em;
}
--
textarea, directory {
font-family: "Courier New", monospace !important;
font-size: 90% !important;
}
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Indeed it does, but copying costs nothing.
So really it is not scarce and the marginal costs are 0, meaning it should be FREE since we can all chip in and buy it once.
My OS vendor I am sure has not paid for any.
"With a Free Tier License, you agree to place a line of Javascript on each web page on your Web Sites that Uses or accesses Web Font Software which will enable the Web Font Services. This also gives Monotype Imaging the right to invoke an ad unit to be placed on each web page that uses our Web Font Software, with the formatting and content of such ad unit to be determined by Monotype Imaging in its sole discretion."
Nothing for free in this world, son, nothing for free.
"Kinky sex involves the use of duck feathers. Perverted sex involves the whole duck." - Lewis Grizzard
By "vendor," I don't mean that guy on the sidewalk who sells you pirated copies of Windows.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Remember the early days of USB and firewire ? One of the "benefits" was that you could daisy chain > 100 devices to a single USB hub About as realistic and usable as 2,000 fonts. I mean , really, if you don't see what you want in the 1st 500......
Well, developers put out insanely complex pieces of software (Firefox, Linux kernel, Gnome, KDE, etc) without expecting any compensation; these software projects are arguably far more complex than making sure that a font is complete.
By "vendor," I don't mean that guy on the sidewalk who sells you pirated copies of Windows.
Who the hell would pirate Windows? That's like stealing a broken film camera.
Yes, sturgeons law does apply, unsurprisingly. Then there is Linux Libertine, Gentium and others. There probably would be many more good ones if the free software tools were better... Unfortunately, for whatever reason, we are stuck with fontforge and the best I can say about it is that it works, most of the time, kinda.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
But even with fonts like Gentium, and Linux Libertine, there's one optical size, one or two weights... compare that to Neue Helvetica family which ships with 3 widths, 9 weights, including obliques for each weight, and an outline font - a total of 51 fonts; or Jenson Pro which ships with 4 optical sizes, four weights, including Roman and Oblique forms... I'm not saying that Gentium, for example, is crap - compared to many free fonts, it's actually quite beautiful... and the care that was put into the Greek characters is fantastic... but it only compares to the basic levels of what many type foundries have to offer when they design and implement a family.
I put this one under tools again, with what we have its just way too much work that a computer should be doing. If only we had something with half the power of metafont that's able to spit out OpenType... Then again, different optical sizes are not what makes a good web font, so I didn't consider that a strong feature in the context.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I sure as hell am not interested in buying a new "web" fee to have them in my web site.
Regarding your sig - I'm not sure why you are suggesting that MS Server and MS NTFS are at issue here, its MS Office that is creating the temporary file, failing to set proper permissions and then promoting that temporary file to the master version. Of course neither NTFS nor MS Server is going to apply extra permissions, as they have no concept of a link between the temporary file and the old master file, because one does not exist.
The same behaviour can be seen with MS Office and any file system. Its a fault with the application, not the server or filesystem.
And looks like ass until you install mscorefonts.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Who the hell would pirate Windows? That's like stealing a broken film camera.
No no no! Remember, copyright infringement is not theft. Pirating Windows is by far the worse, because whoever you copied it from still has it.
But none of that is useful if HTML renderers are not able to perform typography properly, i.e. hyphenation and justification (yes I know it is language dependent, it is notoriously difficult and so on, I use LaTeX...). Having things like font files with ligatures etc included with the intention of using them in a current web browser is like an illiterate person who cannot write, owning a fountain pen.
Neither Firefox's nor IE's rendering engines do what they ought to do.
That, and people really need to take care of what a monitor's "DPI" (or pixels per mm, or resolution) really is.
We could also easily go back to monospace all caps like on the old teletypes and dumb terminals. But why should we if we can do so much better?
Fair enough, but should they be paid every time the font is used? I think once should be enough. If you have a font to sell me, feel free to put it up at http://www.kickstarter.com/ and send me a message.
I WILL pay. Just not over and over for eternity.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
True. The ones educated enough to appreciate these things are probably also far more likely to overvalue it compared to normal people. Therefore they will demand excessive prices. Therefore this will not take off. Therefore web pages will continue to look a little sloppy.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Thou shalt use metafont like thy father and thy father before that! Knuth has commanded it!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
You present a false dichotomy: millions of well-designed, effective, and efficient web pages exist today using the basic facilities of HTML and CSS. A good artist can create beauty within the constraints of his medium, rather than just whining about how the medium isn't rich enough.
What I'm grumpy about is second-raters who foist their artistic "vision" on me without regard to my needs as a consumer. Because what that means is that even though I might believe there is value in what they say, how they choose to say it makes it unpleasant for me to find that value. They are deprived of me as an audience, and I of their wisdom. Hardly the desired outcome for either party. And this new font facility is one more tool that can easily be misused to that end.
And as for the notion of the hard work that goes into fonts; I don't dispute that. But if that's a good enough reason for copyrights, then what about the bricklayer who builds a wall, or the carpenter who makes a door?
Here's the economic argument for copyrights, abbreviated, as I understand it, TINLA, etc.:
Some things cost X dollars (or X amount of natural resources, including human attention) per unit to produce. Some things cost X dollars per unit, plus a fixed amount Y dollars, say to build a widget factory first. For most values of X and Y, the free market is happy to produce what people want.
For some goods, we have X = 0 (or X is tiny) and Y is big. In other words, they're the opposite of drugs: the first one is expensive, the rest are free.
Especially if any user/consumer can produce an extra unit from his or her own unit (i.e. they're bit strings stored on a computer), the market acts rather strangely around these kinds of goods, mostly by not making enough.
But the goods are valuable to society; therefore, we want to make laws that encourage their production---by handing out monopolies which allow (approximately) the people who bear the Y-cost to recuperate that cost and make some profit. Such laws can never be perfect, but they can (if done right and enforced right) be better than the "no laws" alternative.
Walls and doors seem much closer to the X-per-unit or X-per-unit-plus-some-Y (where Y doesn't dwarf X), so we as a society have decided not to make laws that fiddle with the market*.
(* At least not in the way copyrights do; there are, depending on your country, labor laws, price control laws, taxation, import and export controls, but none are, I think, based on the same argument as copyrights)
Making a fancy letter "A" is not an activity that should need any greater reward than a single paycheck.
The sum of money earned before your work goes into the public domain constitutes that single paycheck, you just get advances as you go.
My company would find it worth the money (if I and a few others could convince them to, and if the affected users could actually be corralled to install and use it consistently, and nevermind the internal stresses between the graphic designers vs. marketing vs. regulatory agencies vs. the ridiculous turnover in parties responsible for copy) to buy a couple fonts that include every damn Unicode codepage that we'd reasonably need to use. Right now, the only one I've found easily available (and I'm not a deep expert in this, but am learning) is Microsoft's Arial Unicode MS, which is sans serif, and we'd kinda like a serif'd one, too. There are a few other nice ones that include a fair selection of codepages, but it seems that they still manage to leave out one or more that we actually find critical, so we can't pull all locations in line.
(The application here is packaging materials for pharma, and I support this department and these processes in an organization with printing needs in at least 30-some countries.)
(Also, could care less about eliminating Comic Sans, but Microsoft's Symbol font can go jump off a bridge; it's buried so deeply, treated so weirdly, and is so thoroughly Unicode non-compliant that it manages to sneak in and bugger up documents at almost every stage in our development processes. I'd like to slap the person responsible.)
Not if they can't find someone to pay them, they should not be paid. It's hard to argue that the linux kernel took less work than any 10 fonts, that's free as in beer, buddy. I spend a lot of hours doing "free" stuff and a lot more doing paid stuff. Both are a lot of work, something being hard isn't the measure of whether you get paid for it or not. It may be hard to do a font properly, but most folks don't value it. Pen twirling might also be hard to master, I doubt I'll ever get paid for being a master at it, though.
It's a reference to one of the most commonly mentioned benefits of using a Microsoft stack -- integration. As opposed to the typical GNU/Linux distro that is just clobbered together from parts that haven't been designed to go together.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
It's not 1996 any more. Web site design has moved on, as it has had to in order for sites to differentiate themselves from each other.
Fonts are a big problem on the web. If you want a non-standard one the only real option at the moment is to use an image which hurts the accessibility, searchability and Google ranking of the site.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC