RE: WOFF and extended metadata

On Wednesday, June 09, 2010 5:12 PM Christopher Slye wrote:
> 
> I'll attempt to collect some examples of foundries building and
> licensing WOFF fonts. I think that's the first concern, right?
> Foundries that are creating persistent WOFF files that might cause
> compatibility issues later.
> 

Thank you Christopher for taking the lead on this.

> Of course various entities are also dynamically generating transient
> WOFF and it would be interesting to know what metadata they are
> attaching, if any. Vlad, is Monotype serving WOFF in its web fonts
> service, and if so, are you putting any metadata in there?
> 

We are not yet serving WOFF files in our web font service but we are currently building tools to do it in the nearest future (estimated to be in public beta by mid-July). However, lately we have been licensing fonts from Monotype, Linotype and ITC libraries in WOFF format to the customers who want/need to host all the content and resources themselves, and those WOFF files do have metadata as it is currently defined by the WOFF spec including copyright and trademark information, font description/credits, license and licensee details, and vendor links that point back to our Fonts.com website. I am not at liberty to disclose any specific information at this time, but as soon as the content utilizing our fonts appears on customers' public websites, I will be able to provide more details.

Currently, our web font offering contain fonts from the font libraries we own, and our primary intention with regards to the use of metadata is to provide end users with the information about the fonts (to take the guess-work out of equation) and to promote our end-user oriented offerings - both Fonts.com and Web Font services. We anticipate that in the future we will add third party fonts to our web font services, which will likely be accompanied by the use of vendor-specific metadata extensions.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Vlad

Received on Thursday, 10 June 2010 20:28:18 UTC