RE: Fonts (was Re: follow up on service workers for publishing platform)

On Wednesday, December 02, 2015 12:53 PM Leonard Rosenthol wrote:

> I am not trying to portray doom and gloom, but I am raising a topic that needs 
> deep investigation both from a technical as well as a legal perspective for not 
> only ourselves but the users of PWP.  It would be wrong of us developing 
> a standard to do so known that there are pitfalls for users.

I guess the major contention point on my side is that I disagree that DPUB (or W3C as an entity) needs to be concerned with the licensing / legal aspects of using fonts. Yes, font IP is valuable and fonts as resources need to be properly licensed, but I disagree that DPUB should do anything about it other than to maybe say somewhere in the spec that the use of fonts as part of the publication needs to be properly licensed. The conditions of the license, what it does and doesn’t cover depends on the particular publication uses and does not require any technical  solution from us as a group.

> Web font formats (eg. WOFF) can certainly be referenced from EPUB content, 

Yes, which means that the technology is in place to make it happen and this is what we as a group need to do.

> but they are not permitted to be embedded inside of the EPUB.  

Not permitted by whom? The spec doesn't impose any limitations and technical solutions are in place to make it happen. If a particular vendor's license doesn’t permit this kind of use - I'd say "good luck with that, there are other font vendors that do allow this to happen".

> For that, you would need the TTF/OTF version.   

Again, says who? Certainly there is nothing in the spec that specifically mandates the use of one data format over another.

> And if you then took the EPUB with TTF/OTF and unbundled it on a server, 
> there is no guarantee that the server and/or the client/UA would be able 
> to do the right thing.  And then there is the potential for running afoul of 
> licensing considerations.

Yes, and it goes back to what I mentioned previously - a publisher needs to get the font license that allows them to do what they need to do. If they need to make their content available both online and offline they'd need to use WOFF files and they need a license that allows WOFF files be embedded in EPUB. (If a particular font vendor is not permitting this kind of use - there are others that will.) The particular conditions of that license (and how much it costs) is something that forms a contractual relationship between a client and a vendor - neither W3C nor DPUB / EPUB / PWP specs need to be concerned with that part.

Regards,
Vlad





On 12/2/15, 8:07 AM, "Levantovsky, Vladimir" <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotype.com> wrote:

>I believe that the reality isn't as gruesome as pictured in the example below. Most of the font foundries offer different kind of licenses for different uses - adding e.g. web font license provisions to EPUB license or vice versa would be easy to do and in some cases incur no incremental costs (e.g. Monotype's professional tier web font license gives unlimited access to the whole library and free license for desktop font uses).
>And most of the web font formats are already supported by EPUB.
>
>Thank you,
>Vlad
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Leonard Rosenthol [mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2015 8:34 AM
>To: Ivan Herman
>Cc: Daniel Weck; Dave Cramer; Tzviya Siegman; W3C Digital Publishing 
>IG; Chris Lilley
>Subject: Re: follow up on service workers for publishing platform
>
>PWP specific - particularly the reuse of a packaged publication being served in a non-packaged fashion (or vice-versa).
>
>For example, while most font foundries allow for fonts to be embedded into an EPUB because of the methods used (e.g. Subsetting and/or obfuscation), those same foundries do not allow their fonts to be used as “web fonts” (or at least not without a separate license).  In the same vein, the web font vendors only license their fonts for web use and not for packaging.  
>
>On a related note, there is also the question of what font format(s) can/should be supported within a PWP since those used today for EPUB aren’t necessary compatible with OWP technologies.
>
>(and there is more - but this should give you a taste)
>
>As Heather notes, the issues could be solved with a best practices type of guide - but until the details are exposed, reviewed and resolved - it’s unclear what the correct vehicle(s) would be.
>
>Leonard
>
>
>
>
>On 12/2/15, 12:14 AM, "Ivan Herman" <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>
>>Leonard,
>>
>>> On 2 Dec 2015, at 06:18, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> At some point, this group should probably start a subgroup focused on various font-related issues as there are a number of both technical and legal issues that come up in the content of non-packaged publications and their use of fonts.
>>
>>I do not question the fact that there may be issues with fonts (I copy 
>>Chris explicitly, because he is much more knowledgable than I am).
>>However, the question is whether these issues are publication specific 
>>or general Web issues. If the latter, then I am not sure that type of 
>>work is in the scope of this IG…
>>
>>Can you be more specific what you have in mind to be able to decide this?
>>
>>Thanks
>>
>>Ivan
>>
>>
>>
>>> 
>>> Leonard
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 12/1/15, 9:09 AM, "Ivan Herman" <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On 1 Dec 2015, at 18:03, Daniel Weck <daniel.weck@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 4:50 PM, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I understand this for Acme. However, thinking it further in 
>>>>>> direction of a more sophisticated reader: is it necessary to store all the file references?
>>>>>> After all, I would expect the Service Worker may find out on the 
>>>>>> fly that a resource is to be cached.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> This may be important for the production site. This means I do 
>>>>>> not have to list the references of all the images, js and css 
>>>>>> files, etc, just the 'top level' files to trigger the process and those could be cached.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Of course, there is a danger that the reader would cache too 
>>>>>> much, eg, remote references that the content refers to. So maybe 
>>>>>> the manifest could contain some sort of URI patterns, saying to 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> reader: "if the URI matches one of these patterns, cache it".
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> I would assume that all of the reading system's app resources 
>>>>> would be cached "immediately" (i.e. as early as possible in the 
>>>>> bootstrap process), so that the reading system itself is available offline.
>>>> 
>>>> Absolutely.
>>>> 
>>>>> However, publication content would be cached according to a 
>>>>> particular strategy (on-demand vs. preload, LRU eviction, etc.), 
>>>>> in terms of offline-ing multiple publications, but also in terms 
>>>>> of offline-ing resources within a given publication (partial fetch vs. full cache).
>>>> 
>>>> Right. But, additionally, I think providing some level of content provider option may be necessary (inclusion patterns, exclusion patterns, etc.).
>>>> 
>>>> We used this example before: a publication may refer to very large font files. In some cases, those fonts are for fanciness; ie, it is perfectly o.k. if the reader does not cache those and, in case it is offline, falls back to some system fonts. In other cases those fonts are essential because, for example, they display mathematical symbols or musical notes: in this case the font must be cached, too, for proper offline use. This cannot really be covered algorithmically; it is up to the creator of the publication to control this.
>>>> 
>>>> Ivan
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> Dan
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> ----
>>>> Ivan Herman, W3C
>>>> Digital Publishing Lead
>>>> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

>>>> mobile: +31-641044153
>>>> ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704

>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>
>>
>>----
>>Ivan Herman, W3C
>>Digital Publishing Lead
>>Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

>>mobile: +31-641044153
>>ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704

>>
>>
>>
>>

Received on Wednesday, 2 December 2015 18:53:42 UTC