One font embedding idea

This is somewhat along the lines of the randomised-encoding idea
floated here, only more amenable to searching of text.

When embedding a font in a document, the font per se would not be 
embedded; rather, a table of common digraphs and trigraphs (two-
and three-character sequences) in the text is built up.  For each
polygraphic sequence, the respective characters are ligatured automatically,
using kerning information, into a synthetic glyph.  That way, most if not
all characters in a document can be displayed using these glyphs, which
are in an encoding unique to the document.

To pirate the font, as with the random encoding, the pirate would have
to extract the outline data into an editable format and use an
editor to manually pull apart the characters, which would be rather 
laborious.  However, this would not impede searching;  the text can be 
stored in standard ASCII, and converted into the ligated encoding within 
the browser.  Since there is no one-to-one mapping, the font cannot 
easily be automatically broken up into a normal font.

Just my $0.02;

 -- acb

-- 
  http://www.zikzak.net/~acb/       "`HAVE A NICE DAY' died for your sins."
           <acb@dev.null.org>                                  -- Mumbles

Received on Monday, 12 August 1996 16:03:20 UTC