RE: Embedding fonts

Chris Wilson wrote (3:00 PM -0700 5/11/98):

" >Technical and political issues aside (and there are many), I like TrueDoc
" >better [snip]

" Todd, you fail to mention two of the main drawbacks of the TrueDoc format -

See text before snip. Yes, there are lots of arguments, pro and con, for
both formats. I don't pretend to have represented all of them, nor is my
own mind entirely made up.

" >Unfortunately, Netscape (the TrueDoc implementor) doesn't implement enough
" >CSS to let you embed fonts through CSS. You still have to muck around in
" >the HTML, against the recommendations of the HTML 4.0 Specification.
" 
" Is this really against the recommendation of the HTML4 spec?  It's a bit of
" a hack, to be sure, but they just use a META tag, which I don't think is
" very strenuously defined in HTML 4.0.

They use LINK with the invalid SRC attribute. This is trivial IMO, but the
point remains that you can't manage the presentational aspects of a
document without write access to it - beyond a stylesheet link - which I
take to be the CSS ideal. I see these more as problems with Netscape's CSS
support than with TrueDoc per se, but from a practical POV they're the same
thing.
 
" You can, in fact, specify a list of different formats in the CSS @font-face
" rules for the UA to select.  Even so, though, the designer would need to
" create two copies of the font (one as Embedded OpenType, one as TrueDoc),
" presuming you didn't want to insert the TrueDoc ActiveX control in your
" pages.  If you're going to build two copies of the font anyway, you can use
" the CSS2 syntax IE4 uses for the EOT file, and the META syntax Nav uses -
" neither will interfere with each other.

This is news to me, too, and very welcome. Thanks.


Todd Fahrner
mailto:todd@lowbrow.com
http://www.verso.com/agitprop/

The printed page transcends space and time. The printed page, the
infinitude of books, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.
	- El Lissitzky, 1923

Received on Monday, 11 May 1998 20:29:51 UTC