- From: Adam Twardoch <list.adam@twardoch.com>
- Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:49:22 +0100
- To: "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>
- CC: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@adobe.com>, Mikko Rantalainen <mikko.rantalainen@peda.net>
Thomas Phinney wrote: > But I still consider this a side issue. Web designers want to be able to use retail fonts, and they want to be able to use most any font. Ergo, a solution which doesn't make font vendors happy won't make web designers happy either. I agree. If the consequence will be that instead of a handful fonts now (Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, Arial etc.) the web designers will be able to use maybe 3 or 4 times as much, tops (that is, only the ones that are freely licensed), then the whole issue is not worth the effort. Even for alphabets/writing systems that do not yet have lots of fonts available, it is the Web that can contribute to the typographic development of those scripts — but IMO only if there are reasonable revenue opportunities associated with it. Right now, making Indic or Arabic fonts does not offer huge commercial prospects because of the widespread piracy. But web fonts, if done right, can offer some typographic talent in those countries some career paths and opportunities that they would otherwise not follow. This is the major issue that some of the "free software" proponents seem to forget: very often, there is no choice between so-called "will there be free software" and "will there be proprietary software". Instead, the choice is "will there be software at all" or "will there be no software at all". If there is a chance that a larger part of the human society worldwide can read and write their own language on the internet, all stakeholders should sort their priorities and look for a model that will give those people that chance under _any_ model. Where I come from, freedom for people should come first _before_ the freedom for other things (like software or capital). A. -- Adam Twardoch | Language Typography Unicode Fonts OpenType | twardoch.com | silesian.com | fontlab.net I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. (Hunter S. Thompson)
Received on Thursday, 13 November 2008 18:30:53 UTC