Obfuscation (was Re: [Minutes] EPUB WG vF2F meeting 1st day, 2021-10-28)

Looks like a great meeting – keep up the good work folks!

I just want to put a note in here that the reason for obfuscation in EPUB is that, unlike PDF or the Web itself, there is no provision for subset fonts.  As Dave and Dan point out, the issue is around protecting the rights of the font vendor (and the user who paid for the font license).   When a font is subset – as it is for PDF and when used with Web Fonts & WOFF – it is useless to anyone else since it will be missing glyphs (and all sorts of other things like kerning and layout info).  In fact, if you try, you will find that all operating systems won’t even load a subset font.

If you want to get rid of obfuscation, either move to supporting external fonts (either loaded by URL or from the RS or both) or work out the technical parts of how to embed a subset of a WOFF (that would then be feedable back into the Web Font APIs).   NOTE: the latter can be done – we’ve done it for Adobe Acrobat’s Liquid Mode where we present PDFs (including subset fonts) in HTML – though we are starting with subset data.

Leonard

From: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>
Date: Friday, October 29, 2021 at 5:55 AM
To: W3C EPUB 3 Working Group <public-epub-wg@w3.org>
Subject: [Minutes] EPUB WG vF2F meeting 1st day, 2021-10-28
Minutes are here:

https://www.w3.org/publishing/groups/epub-wg/Meetings/Minutes/2021-10-28-epub<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2Fpublishing%2Fgroups%2Fepub-wg%2FMeetings%2FMinutes%2F2021-10-28-epub&data=04%7C01%7Clrosenth%40adobe.com%7Cc9e1d293fdde455d4bd208d99ac24a12%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C637710981528617846%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=b2xk3kBAlwciaXzffbwdMEH6g26eF39tRS7e6Lx1geE%3D&reserved=0>

Ivan

----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2FPeople%2FIvan%2F&data=04%7C01%7Clrosenth%40adobe.com%7Cc9e1d293fdde455d4bd208d99ac24a12%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C637710981528627802%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=aVMi70yT076af%2B9cB%2FxxUds758j5kvvlVJDP2eZBJNw%3D&reserved=0>
mobile: +33 6 52 46 00 43
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Forcid.org%2F0000-0003-0782-2704&data=04%7C01%7Clrosenth%40adobe.com%7Cc9e1d293fdde455d4bd208d99ac24a12%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C637710981528627802%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=Yw3cQNa0%2Bo1CIfu%2BDRomUbugEMMtGwVSB95F7%2B2GDT0%3D&reserved=0>