Re: Hosted source format?

While I agree that it is helpful to make a clear distinction between 
stored (hosted) and exposed (served) formats, I am aware that a lot of 
foundries do not yet do this, so this is exactly the sort of thing I 
anticipate needing to discuss. I am also aware that a lot of foundries 
go to considerable length to obscure the path to webfonts on  their own 
sites, and may prefer to not have customers hosting raw TTF and OTF 
files on their servers.

J.


On 2024-07-16 12:22 am, Vladimir Levantovsky wrote:
> To facilitate our discussion during the WG Zoom call, I think it would 
> be productive to make a clear distinction between the "stored" font 
> format vs. what is actually "exposed" to web font clients - either via 
> @font-face declarations or, in our new use case, as an IFT subset..
>
> IIRC, Monotype license used to clearly differentiate the two cases 
> (server storage vs. web fonts formats), where licensed fonts could be 
> stored on a server in their original source formats, but the "exposed" 
> font formats (i.e., what would be allowed to be used with 
> CSS @font-face declarations) were limited to WOFF / WOFF2 - the 
> license would prohibit transfering a font to a web browser / client in 
> TTF or OTF source format.
>
> Not imposing restrictions on storing a TTF / OTF font on a server 
> (e.g. for the purpose of generating subsets of the font) makes perfect 
> sense, for as long as the access to the font is limited to the server 
> and other workstations licensed to use it. Yes, one could've stored 
> fonts on a web server only in WOFF2 format, and would have to unpack a 
> font every time a subset needs to be generated, but IMO, unless one 
> has limitations on storage capacity and wants to minimize font file 
> storage size, it doesn't make much sense, and only adds processing 
> time without any tangible benefit.
>
> Vlad
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 10:32 PM Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org> wrote:
>
>     Hi John,
>
>     On 2024-07-11 19:03, John Hudson wrote:
>>     At that time, he presumed the hosted source format for IFT would
>>     be an uncompressed TTF or OTF file, but I pointed out that
>>     license agreements might be worded in such a way that webfonts
>>     need to be /hosted/ as WOFF2 or WOFF. Garret thought it should be
>>     possible for the hosted source font to be pre-compressed as WOFF2
>>     or WOFF, then decompressed, subsetted, and recompressed as WOFF2
>>     for delivery. I wanted to check on the status of this query, and
>>     wasn’t able to find a definite answer in the working draft text.
>
>     That used to be the case, in particular for the old range-request
>     method.
>
>     With the new draft, the incremental version of the font is a
>     regular sfnt font with two extra tables holding the links to the
>     patches. This means that WOFF compression will yield a
>     bit-identical font; and WOFF2 compression can be used, and will
>     yield a functionally identical font, provided certain conditions
>     are met when creating the incremental version:
>     https://www.w3.org/TR/IFT/#ift-and-woff2
>
>     -- 
>     Chris Lilley
>     @svgeesus
>     Technical Director @ W3C
>     W3C Strategy Team, Core Web Design
>     W3C Architecture & Technology Team, Core Web & Media
>
-- 

John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks Ltdwww.tiro.com

Tiro Typeworks is physically located on islands
in the Salish Sea, on the traditional territory
of the Snuneymuxw and Penelakut First Nations.

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