Re: TrueDoc reservations

Thomas Rickner wrote:

>Speaking as a designer, producer and user of type, I have some concerns about a
>technology such as TrueDoc.

I also have some reservations. One problem is that the TrueDoc scheme is
based on blowing up characters to a large size on the source platform,
and then re-digitizing them. Many Japanese fonts come with some builtin
limit for enlargement (means you have to pay extra if you want to use
these fonts for characters in display sizes). With such fonts, it may happen
that what TrueDoc wants to do is not possible, or only at restricted quality.

Also, one has to be aware of the fact that while in the US, only the imple-
mentation of a font (i.e. the font program) is copyright-protected, and thus
TrueDoc fonts most probably can be passed around freely, many other countries
have more strict (and more reasonable) copyright protection of fonts,
protecting also the design. Therefore, if TrueDoc fonts are not strictly
linked to the documents that they have been generated for (this may be
the case; I don't know the details), this scheme may not be feasible
worldwide.


>How confident can a Web publisher be that the reader will see the same thing as
>he/she is designing on the Mac or PC which is on their desktop.

Well, apart from the problems of screen resolution, color lookup table
congestion, white temperature of the display, and other details of
illumination and such, there is a very failproof way already to be
sure your reader sees the same as you do: Use bitmaps :-!

Regards,	Martin.

Received on Thursday, 7 March 1996 15:29:57 UTC