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