Freedom for Fonts

Dan I read your web page.
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/javafont.htm

But I think your missing the real problem Its not Javasoft.
The problem is fonts are proprietary. Plus there is a strong precedence
for control of
font readers creators and where and how they display there glyphs.
Downloaded fonts being a
big problem. Javasoft  for convince want's to use Adobe and MS fonts
that are
available on each machine unfortunately they cannot allow uninhibited
redistribution
via java because of copyright.
I would be extremely hesitant to build the technology that would allow
trivial transmission and use of fonts with todays copyrights.

As you know the browsers are barley able to use downloaded fonts in a
crippled way.
This is not sufficient for a real program.

With the new "web" old style proprietary fonts are as crippling as
Microsoft controlling
all web browsers.

The   only answer in my opinion is to develop a new free font
technology in Java.
With  "fonts" represented by serialized objects.

The creation of a "Font" object is font file/Tool  dependent but after
that it is trivial to
simply serialize the font objects.  One simply has to use freely
available fonts.

Bitmap fonts are easy. I have not  yet worked on "outline" fonts but
they are also
quit doable. You just have to come  up with a serialization scheme.
And since the object knows how to recreate itself this scheme need not
be standard.
There are tons of free fonts out there so there is nothing preventing
you from creating
enough to satisfy basic programing needs.

These serialized objects can be read by "c" programs if  you had too.

Its actually fairly trivial the only real problem is in the beginning
you will have to avoid
all the copywrited  fonts until they become irrelevant.  Adobe  won't
change its
copyright policy  until consumers demand it.


This is the way to break the "Font" monopoly IMHO.

Just do it : )


Mike

mike@jmaca.com

Received on Monday, 9 February 1998 11:25:58 UTC