- From: Bill Hill <billhill@microsoft.com>
- Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 08:09:14 -0800
- To: "'www-font@w3.org'" <www-font@w3.org>, "'glen@met.bitstream.com'" <glen@met.bitstream.com>
So far, we have watched quietly while Bitstream attempts to muddy the
water on this issue, but...
Glen, you know very well that in TrueType at least, there are bits in
the font file which allow the original manufacturer to specify whether
the font is embeddable in documents.
There are three levels of embedding (four, if you count embedding
disabled)
Read-only embedding (print and preview)
Editable embedding (font useable only inside the document in which
it's embedded)
Fully-installable (allows the font to be used anywhere)
This embedding mechanism, was agreed at a Windows Open Services
Architecture review - in which all the major players in the font
industry participated.
Our guess is that level 1, read-only embedding, is likely to become the
standard on the Web - but that's entirely up to the font manufacturers.
You haven't mentioned another feature of TrueDoc: because the original
font is not there, screen quality is poor.
Read-only embedding provides the same protection to font vendors
without anyone having to give up decent screen quality.
bill
----------
From: glen@met.bitstream.com[SMTP:glen@met.bitstream.com]
Sent: Friday, March 29, 1996 9:23 AM
To: www-font@w3.org
Subject: Why TrueDoc?
Bitstream is committed to honoring all legitimate rights of type
designers and foundries throughout the world. The following
influenced
the rock solid design of TrueDoc and positions it as the premier
font
technology choice for internet developers.
Bitstream and Adobe were the key players in persuading the US
copyright office in 1991 to change its position from one in which
fonts had no protection into the current position in which font
programs enjoy the same protection as any other software programs.
Bitstream and Adobe led the lawsuit against Swfte for copyright
infringement of their font software programs. As part of the
settlement, Swfte acknowledged its acceptance and agreement with
the
U.S. Copyright Office rulings permitting the registration of
copyright
in certain programs used in the generation of digitized
representations of typeface designs in the same manner as other
programs.
Bitstream has designed TrueDoc to provide publishers with
identical
font capabilities when publishing electronic documents that they
have
always enjoyed when publishing documents on paper. This makes
fonts
just as useful in the emerging "distribute-and-print" world as
they
were in the old "print-and-distribute" one and hence creates new
opportunities for font vendors.
TrueDoc accomplishes this without embedding fonts, or subsets of
fonts, into electronic documents. It doesn't even access the
original
font files themselves. Instead, TrueDoc captures the character
shapes
that result from executing the fonts -- just like what happens whe
n
printing the document on paper. Storing these compressed character
shapes with an electronic document guarantees that it can be
viewed or
printed on any platform, anywhere in the world. If the original
fonts
happen to be available at the viewing/printing end, they are of
course
used. If not, the character shapes stored in the document by
TrueDoc
provide a high fidelity alternative. All of this is accomplished
without risk to the font designer's intellectual property -- which
never leaves the point where it was legitimately installed.
Because the TrueDoc approach is the electronic equivalent of
printing
first and distributing second, it automatically gives publishers
of
electronic documents the same rights and responsibilities in the
use
of fonts as if they were distributing paper documents.
Bitstream is alarmed, therefore, at the prospect of the wholesale
embedding of fonts into portable documents, with or without the
owner's permission, that seems to be implied by recent web font
announcements.
Received on Monday, 1 April 1996 11:09:25 UTC