Re: Whatever happened to w3 fonts?

On Feb 17, 10:10pm, Clive Bruton wrote:

> [someone]
> >yes -- but existing TT software can read OpenType fonts and use them, but
> >doesn't understand the copy protection, and ignores that.
>
> I don't see how that can be, if existing TT software can read all the
> features of OpenType

Not quite what the original poster said. TT software can read OT fonts -
that seems reasonable, because these are a set of tables and the cmap,
hhea, head, name and post tables will still be there and can be read.

Of course there will be tables in there that are not understood, such as
dsig, gpos, gsub and there might be cff (compressed Type1 glyphs) in
addition to or even instead of glyf (in which latter case the older
program would indeed fail).

I note that DSIG is on the list of required tables, [1] and gather the
intent is that newer software refuses to read the font if this table is
not all hunky-dory. Of course, third parties can write software that
ignores this table.

Existing TT fonts do not have this table - but then, only the copyright
owner can make such fonts available on the Web. DSIG appears to allow
licencees to put the fonts on the Web, and my understanding is that the
DSIGtavble will contain a signed and verifiable machine readabble assertion
about the terms of that license. For example, it might be that Joe Webster
licensed this font from Glypf Factory for use on http://joe.org/foo only.

Other sites pointing to those fonts would not work. Well that is the
theory as I understand it.

Having never laid my hands on an actual OT font, I am unable to conduct
the obvious experiments (give it to Win3.1, give it to MacOS, drop it into
Fontographer and re-save) to see if the font works.


[1] http://www.microsoft.com/truetype/otspec/tablist.htm



-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Tuesday, 18 February 1997 08:40:23 UTC