Re: Adobe-Apple-Netscape ..

Hakon Lie writes:

> glen@met.bitstream.com writes:
> 
>  > Hakon, I 
>  > would like to have a BOF meeting at the Paris conference in May regarding 
>  > transport of fonts, how they are referenced, imaged, and printed. I willing to 
>  > set up the meeting an work on this. Could you indicate how to proceed?
> 
> Sorry for the late reply. I'm in charge of Developer's day and have
> planned a session on Graphics/Fonts. Chris Lilley will be organizing
> it. With the recent interest in Web Fonts, perhaps we should dedicate
> a session to fonts alone? What do you think, Chris?

I agree that there seems enough interest and material for two separate 
sessions. For fonts, there could be presentations from  Microsoft, from 
Adobe/Apple/Netscape and from Bitstream. 

A demonstration of a CSS-enabled browser performing font fetching by talking to 
some sort of prototype font resolution service would also be good, if it 
could be arranged in time. The general issue of font resolvers needs exploring 
and needs to be decoupled from stylesheets because other media, including Java 
applets, may require font resolution services also.

A brief update on micropayments in the font session could also be useful, 
I feel. Particularly if someone could propose a cheap micropayment 
negotiation method to integrate into the font retrieval process.

The whole issue of antialiasing would seem to merit part of the session. 
There are issues of hinting for antialiasing (in vector formats) alpha 
planes (for bitmapped formats) and layout/compositing issues, particularly 
when taken togewther with inline graphic formats that have transparency, 
and background images that may or may not be scrolling with the text. Someone 
to talk on layout issues at a developer level woulsd be excellent.

I see font provision as having two orthogonal axes. One is depth or number 
of different faces, styles etc. The other is breadth - providing at least 
one glyph (in any face and style) for each character in the repertoire of 
ISO 10646/Unicode. So, something on the breadth axis would be good.


For graphics, I see that just today the preliminary MIME registration 
for SVF was submitted along with autocad DXF and DWG. So perhaps something 
on vector formats in general would be good.

The issue of image metadata is becoming prominent, and I would like to 
have someone talk about this. I have just finished reading a survey and 
report on academic networked access to imagebanks which hilights the 
need for good image metadata handling.

Another possibility for the graphics area is a discussion on commercial 
image fidelity requirements for advertising and online sales , especially 
catalogues. I just read an article discussing this and essentially dismissing 
online delivery because the quality was so por and the number of catalog 
returns would be so high. This however can be and is changing - an 
update or debate would be interesting.

> Developer's day is on May 10th, so a BOF a day or two before could
> also be interesting. www5-info@inria.fr will take suggestions for
> BOFs.

It would be good to organise a page for that BOF, pointing to the various 
font resources and suggesting that attendees be familiar with the material
before the BOF. An opportunity for face to face discussion is too valuable 
to spend it getting slightly interested folks up to speed.

Preparing a BOF agenda ahead of time would also help.

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
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Received on Monday, 11 March 1996 07:11:23 UTC