Re: Downloadable fonts and image replacement

Octavio Alvarez wrote:

 > If the site wants to have fonts available the same site should
 > bring a font server up.


Is this necessary ?  Back in the good old days when Microsoft
were offering Tahoma, Verdana, Trebuchet MS and Georgia for
free download, they might (had the technology allowed) have
also offered them via a font server for usages just such as
that being discussed.  Why then would a site want to serve
its own copies of these four fonts when the Microsoft site
could serve the entire user community ?  Furthermore,
a typographer might be happy to gave his/her fonts served
via a font server which he knows and trusts, but distinctly
unwilling to allow all and sundry to serve them.

 > MUAs can also examine the documents to check what glyphs are used
 > and auto-determine the range.


As has already been mentioned, that would have a disastrous
effect on incremental rendering unless one pre-rendered in
a fallback font and only finally rendered when the document
was fully loaded and analysed.  And what if (G@d forbid) one
could specify a downloadable font to be used in text input
regions ?  Then one could never know which glyphs were
required until the "Submit" button was finally pressed ...

Philip Taylor

Received on Tuesday, 25 April 2006 17:34:25 UTC