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

Hi Leonard,

Sorry you couldn't make the meeting yesterday, or the PING review meeting
where this was also discussed. I think we did capture your comments in
both, which is the historical reason for font obfuscation. We do already
support external fonts (loaded by URL) and WOFF (1 & 2), so there is no
particular need to use obfuscation other than backwards compatibility with
older reading systems and perhaps because it is already part of a
particular toolchain. Of course, it would be difficult to remove font
obfuscation from the spec since we already have existing epubs that use it,
but we could encourage new epubs to use one of the alternative (and likely
better) options.

On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 4:50 AM Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
wrote:

> 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>
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>
>
> Ivan
>
>
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C
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