the alternative?

I understand the worries voiced by a number of type designers on this
list concerning the perceived risks of font embedding on the Web. But
I'm wondering what will happen if a working, secure embedding solution
isn't made available soon. 

Netscape has for the past month included support for the FONT FACE tag,
that allows designers to specify which fonts should be used to render
passages of text. Already sites ( http://www.audities.com ) are
beginning to provide complete fonts for their readers to download and
manually install. I'm getting asked by designers where they can get
their hands on plugins or ActiveX controls that will simplify the
process of font download and installation. Such an application would be
easy to produce and I'm sure there are people working on programs to do
this right now. I'd guess it's only a matter of weeks before we see...

***This site looks best in StolenFont - click here to automatically
download and install this font.***

I'm not saying that the availability of an embedding solution from MS,
Adobe or whoever is definitely going to stop this from happening, but it
might help. Comments, thoughts anyone?

Si Daniels

i-simond@microsoft.com
http://www.microsoft.com/truetype/

These are my own thoughts and not those of my employer or Microsoft,
okay!

Received on Thursday, 22 August 1996 13:07:39 UTC