Re[5]: Protecting WebFonts

erik van blokland wrote:

> Furthermore, it is unwise to believe in the possibility of secrets, and 
> finally, the integrity of users towards fonts has been thoroughly 
> tested in the world of personal computing already...
     
I agree. It was that premise that started this thread on protecting fonts. 
Something I think we should get back to.

Whether fonts are distributed as outlines or bitmaps, unless protected they 
are still subject to theft. It's no more difficult to write a font crawler 
that collects a full set of pixel fonts in various sizes than it is to 
write one to collect outlines. 

> Anything that's decided on as the webfonts standard will be obsolete in 
> two years anyway, just because the introduction of type is going to 
> raise the expectation of webtypography *so much* that current outline 
> based proposals have to be completely revamped anyway.
     
The W3C font work group has been working very hard to design a mechanism 
that is easily extensible to handle the wide variety of font mechanisms - 
those existing and those yet to be created. I think we've been successful, 
but you'll get an opportunity to judge for yourself in the near future.

The current font draft will allow LettError to create a pixel font engine 
for use with their fonts. It will plug right in, invisible to the end 
user. Go for it.

     Brad Chase
     Product Manager
     
     Bitstream Inc.
     
     brad_chase@bitstream.com

Received on Tuesday, 27 August 1996 08:32:25 UTC