- From: Bill McCoy <mccoy@mv.us.adobe.com>
- Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 07:54:02 -0700
- To: www-font@w3.org
- Cc: mccoy@mv.us.adobe.com
Walter Ian Kaye writes: >Here's my question: Are there people who feel same-metric MM fonts are not >sufficient for substituting when the actual font is not on the user's system? Yes. Our user testing and product experience with Adobe Acrobat have overwhelmingly pushed us to favor embedding vs. substitution. Note that we had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this... we thought that MM substitution was the neatest thing since sliced bread, and continued to push it despite ample evidence that it wasn't viewed as satisfactory by users. The reality is that users want the real fonts. It really is the "digital paper" model. How would you like MM substitution in your copier? And of course MM substitution (and even much higher quality font fauxing, such as Ares Chameleon, now part of Adobe) doesn't work at all for anything other than normal text faces. Even faces that users may think of as text - Tekton, Lithos - cannot be reasonably approximated. It is no coincidence that all the vendors of font technology that had been pushing "imitation"-type technology have in the last couple of years added "embedded"-type technology - Bitstream, Ares, and HP/Elsewhere. We think fauxing technology does have a good future, but primarily as a way of providing highly compressed fonts. I.e., so that a desktop (or a printer) can appear to have, say, 300 fonts installed, while consuming a much smaller disk (or ROM) footprint. >I, for one, do not want fonts to be embedded. Metrics sure, but not the font >itself. If someone needs to show a logo on the Web, use a GIF. One additional point following on from my earlier message. With appropriate identification, code-signing, etc., it's possible to set up a link from embedded font subsets back to electronic commerce with the vendor of that font, and this is one of Adobe's goals with our multi-partner OpenType initiative and with our work with the W3C on Web font tags for HTML. Thus, every font used in an online document can become an advertisement for the font. When someone views an electronic document, the font subset will not be installed in the user's system and thus will not be available for editing use (this is how Acrobat works today). But an editing application could be smart enough that if the user tries to edit document text that uses an embedded subset not on the system, the options presented - e.g., change to another font, abort the edit - can include the useful option of buying and on-the-fly installing the font. Yes, with font subsets flying around the web in this fashion there is no doubt going to be some increased piracy. This seems an eminently reasonable cost of doing business in return for the increased revenue from this kind of exposure. Whereas a GIF just ain't going to sell many fonts. :-) --Bill Bill McCoy Adobe Systems Incorporated mccoy@adobe.com
Received on Sunday, 11 August 1996 10:58:20 UTC