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

More is good, but

[Dachannien]

...we really just need one less.

Re:More is good, but

[RedEars]

Can I nominate a second in Papyrus???

Oh great

[LWATCDR]

More websites that look like ransom notes.

Re:Oh great

[WrongSizeGlass]

More websites that look like ransom notes.

Dont you mean "conditional requests for donations"?

But will IE accept the new font files?

[Animats]

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?

Re:But will IE accept the new font files?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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

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.

Re:But will IE accept the new font files?

[plan10]

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.

Re:But will IE accept the new font files?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Seriously, why do you think fonts should not be copyrightable? Is it just the generic Slashdot "I should be entitled to copy anything I like" mentality, or can you actually come up with a rational reason why you should be allowed to take a creative product -- one that may represent years of hard work -- and use it without compensating the creator?

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.

Re:But will IE accept the new font files?

[plan10]

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.

Re:Seriously?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Apparently at least one sans serif font.

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.

Important Issues

[RAMMS EIN]

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.

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:Important Issues

[Kozz]

As a developer, it's disheartening every time I see some kind of feature that looks exciting, only to discover that less than 50% of the site's visitors would be able to use it. Sadly, when IE doesn't support it, I have to shelve the idea and say, "Well, guess I'll check back in a few years."

Ransom letter homework handouts

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"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.

Performance?

[time961]

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?

Re:Performance?

[mikael_j]

Well, one thing this will hopefully cut down on is all the extra images and associated markup that's being used today when attempting to create something that doesn't just look like a flat, ugly and ancient chunk of text (hint: the web has evolved past being the equivalent of a bunch of networked text files). It also means that designers can more easily make sites that don't break for some users because they don't have the right fonts (this is a major issue, the default serif and sans-serif fonts are rarely the same between operating systems and a lot of times even versions of the same operating system).

Dismissing websites that have actually been designed as opposed to just latex2html-ified as "art" really just makes you come off as a grumpy person with no sense for estetics and good presentation of the information.

I'm not saying this won't be abused, everything that can be abused will be abused, most likely by some teenager who just took his/her school's "intro to web design" course that teaches only the basics of "how" and not the "why" (as in, "how" to use web fonts, not "why" you should use them). Also, with a little luck this will be a feature that you can disable for those sites that insist on misbehaving.

I don't know why they bother

[0xdeadbeef]

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.

just embed them

[kcwebmonkey]

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

Re:just embed them

[spikeb]

thanks for making the web a little more of a shitty place.

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.

Five Classic Type Faces

[westlake]

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.

Re:Why...

[MagikSlinger]

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.

The labor value theory of doesn't explain the price of Helvetica which has been around for 50 years and heavily used (and bought). It's more like, "Multi-million dollar corporations are using this font to make millions, if not billions of dollars. You are using our work to make lots of money, so we deserve a cut of the action." And corporations go, "Using Helvetica really does bring me that much more money than I spent on it." So thus the expensive prices even for insanely popular and old fonts.

The problem I have with their prices is that as an amateur, not-making-a-dime web site maker, the $1,300 CDN the price is too high for the value I would get from it. So I will stick to things that don't cost me nearly 2 weeks wages--the free Microsoft fonts.

In a sense, this is probably pareto-optimal, but the rest of the world is poorer for me using Microsoft's Arial instead of something they'd enjoy more.

(What I'd like is a differential pricing scheme where a home user can buy a properly licensed font for a lot less, while they can still charge out the whazoo to United Airlines)

Yin and Yang...

[frank_adrian314159]

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.

Re:Yin and Yang...

[swilver]

More aesthetically pleasing for whom?

I use the fonts that I use because they look good on my screen setup. More fonts just means more websites that think I use a 800x600 screen, browse in full-screen mode, on a Windows Box using IE6. They might as well just serve me a picture of their website, it's probably less work and is atleast guaranteed to be pixel-perfect(TM) in any browser.

Adding fonts to the mix will just means the pixel-pushing crowd of web-designers can make my life even more miserable.

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.

Took long enough

[Intron]

The font designers couldn't work with web technologies until recently. New AMD processors are finally hot enough to melt lead.

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:Do people really care about fonts?

[radtea]

I think I need 3 fonts to get along just fine

Pretty much, and those are exactly the same three fonts everyone uses. Font weenies are just a bunch of wankers who make so much noise about how important exactly the right font is that they get other people to pay attention to them.

They have done zero empirical testing on any aspect of font design, not even whether anyone can actually tell the difference between two "different" fonts without a detailed side-by-side comparison.

Basically, anyone who is worried about fonts beyond the three you mention is paying way to much attention to presentation and by implication far too little attention to content.

Re:Just what I want. More external crap the user h

[kevinmenzel]

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...

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:Do people really care about fonts?

[Draek]

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?

They don't, but they should: a good, quality fontface makes a world of difference in legibility vs a poorly-chosen one, and while the difference may be small for short works such as your typical Slashdot post, it becomes much more noticeable as the work becomes longer to the point that book editors pay thousands of dollars to get the perfect font for their books, because readers may *believe* it has no effect, but there's enough scientific studies proving that it does and quite measurably so.

With that said, however, the defaults on OSX, Linux/BSD and Windows are fairly good so as long as you stick to the old rule of "sans serif for screens, serif for print" you should get 90% of the way with 1% of the effort. Sadly designers are a snobbish and wasteful sort, so here we go with all this crap polluting the CSS standard only to allow morons to make entire websites in Comic Sans MS. Ahh well, at least we can still disable it.

Re:Just what I want. More external crap the user h

[Hatta]

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.

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.