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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."
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.
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?
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.
What's a amazing is that so many of the fonts are basically just re-creations of typefaces that are certainly out of copyright.
The original "Calson" font mentioned in the article is at least 200 hundred years old, yet there are a number of Calson offering, like from Adobe, costing some $45 bucks.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to accept that a new way (or method) of drawing a stylised letter "A" is a sufficiently "creative" activity worthy of the extreme levels of promotion and protection that copyright offers. Especially when the differences between this "new" letter "A" (I can't believe I'm writing this) and some other version are so minimal only typeface experts can tell the difference; the very typeface experts who benefit most from font copyrights to begin with. I smell a guild at work.
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? Why don't the people they sell to have to pay rent forever more? Why should people have to pay rent for using a Letter "P" with a long tail? Is it really that special? Especially when the people who made the original scribble have been dead for 50 years.
Copyright on fonts is not a concept that can be taken seriously, no matter how many typeface makers had friends in the English Parliament all those years ago. Tellingly, even the US has thus far declined to promote this supposed artistic field, with only a dubious software loophole still permitting typeface makers to extort people. Making a fancy letter "A" is not an activity that should need any greater reward than a single paycheck.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
Font files are essentially code executed by a rasterizer, and the code is copyrighted by Adobe.
So far not Project Gutenburg or Mutopia for typefaces just yet.
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.