- From: <S.N.Brodie@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 13:20:50 +0100 (BST)
- To: Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr (Chris Lilley)
- Cc: www-font@w3.org
Chris Lilley wrote: > > Treating a pixel font (or an outline font rendered with anti-aliasing) as > an alpha channel rather than as image data has interesting possibilities, > such as true antialiased text of any color on any color background, or > foreground images on display type. This kind of antialiasing of any colour text on any background (plain colour or multicolour bitmap images) is technology already deployed in some OSes - it works superbly for me on my machine (Acorn Risc PC) and the quality of rendering is extremely good. You should be able to buy a NetStation within a couple of months which contains this technology and see it for yourself (http://www.acorn.co.uk/). Has this sort of technology been considered by the Fonts group? (or is it being, or will it be?) > Not just Opentype, any font which is used on the Web must adress these > concerns. There is a balance to be struck between hindering legitimate use and > hindering illegitimate use; just a s there is a balance to be struck by font > vendors between focussing on a small number of phototypsetting bureaux and a > large number of Web site authors as potential markets. This is a genuine question, not meant to be sarcastic: what kind of technology is it that the font designers wish to protect here? Is it the bezier data? The kerning and hinting information, that sort of thing? > > However, it would be necessary to show how > > the bitmap font approach can be made amenable to high quality printing. > > That seems to be an important requirement, as print-on-demand shops that > generate 'books" of printed and bound document sets looks like a growth area. Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that the font vendors wish to prevent - high quality print reprodution? This is one way in which they could preserve their control on their fonts - license them to such print-on-demand shops. -- Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/ http://delenn.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Received on Friday, 9 August 1996 08:21:20 UTC