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."

Comments

Re:Why...

[realmolo]

Because creating a *complete* font that looks good is a lot of work. Basically, every character has to be hand-tweaked to look good at different point sizes. It's tedious work, and not many people know how to do it.

So, fonts are expensive because it's VERY hard to make good ones. And there isn't much of a market for them (relatively speaking), so the price never drops.

Re:But will IE accept the new font files?

[PhrostyMcByte]

Yes, Microsoft is implementing the WOFF standard, along with all the other browsers.

Re:Important Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: #2

if a designer wants you to see Caslon, she can purchase it from the font company that owns it or through services such as Typekit, which has a library of fonts available by subscription. That font will be delivered to the designer's website and to anyone viewing it, even if the font is not installed on the computer.

The designer is satisfied because you are seeing what she intended you to see, and the typeface designers are satisfied because they were paid.

Frank Martinez, a New York lawyer who specializes in intellectual property law and who represents several typeface designers and foundries, said the difference between having a font temporarily downloaded to your computer and having it installed permanently on your computer is like hearing a song on the radio versus getting a band's CD. "Either way you receive the music," he said. "But if you hear it on the radio, you don't own it, and you can't play it again."

We'll see, Mr Martinez, we'll see.

Re:Won't make a difference!

[tepples]

what use are they if they are not installed on the user's macine?

They aren't installed on the user's machine. Instead, they are linked through CSS @font-face, but only licensed sites can hotlin the font that way.

That and font editors are expensive

[tepples]

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.

This is a big deal... really.

[CherniyVolk]

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.

Re:This is a big deal... really.

[shaunbr]

And if you want to embed a font from one of the major foundries into a piece of software (a video game, for example), you're starting to talk real money. I wanted to use a particular font from one of the major foundries in a project of mine. You can purchase the font for fairly cheap, but the license only allows the use of the font by one person, and limits what kinds of output can be done with it. I requested a quote for embedding a bitmap of the font into my project, and the lowest price they quoted was $2700 - and that was to embed one font, in one font face, at one font size, in a bitmap format only. Embedding the actual font would cost over $20k, plus additional royalties that would need to be negotiated based on the budget of the game and number of copies sold. And all this for a game I intended to release for free.

I don't even think the Open Source community has to step up to this -- if somebody would put together a foundry that makes reasonable fonts, and allows them to be licensed for use in Open Source or low price commercial software products for a fair price (less than $100 would be great), I'd be more than happy to give them my business.

Re:Mozilla's font files?

[Animats]

I must have completely missed it, but... what exactly would "Mozilla's font files" entail?

Netscape 4.x through 5.x supported "Dynamic Fonts", downloadable font files. Worked fine, but Microsoft didn't like it and didn't support it in IE. When IE was free and Netscape cost money, IE won out. Netscape then gave up on font support, which was a technology they licensed from Bitstream, not an open standard.

Re:But will IE accept the new font files?

[BZ]

> If it is WOFF, what prevents one from decompressing and installing it locally?

Nothing, just like nothing prevents you from recording songs off the radio.

The key is that it makes it impossible to say you didn't know you had the font on your system, or that it was accidentally dragged from your cache folder to your fonts folder or whatnot. The compression is not meant as DRM but as a way to make the font smaller, from the UA point of view. From the foundry point of view it makes the "my browser just put this decompressed font on my system" defense not fly: if it's there and decompressed, you decompressed it or got it from someone who did.

WOFF

[pavon]

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.

The Monotype approach is awful.

[Animats]

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.)

Re:Won't make a difference!

[aztracker1]

There are a number of fonts that are openly available, and can be packaged via fontsquirrel for you. I've done this with Inconsolata and even a CP437 font before, I tend to use it as my preferred fixed-width font. There's options out there. :) In terms of branding alone, being able to buy a brand font from a font foundry for website use would be awesome. Though I think most fonts should simply be available.

Reading through the Fine Print in the EULA...

[SuperDuck]

"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.