Re: Whatever happened to w3 fonts?

On Feb 18, 12:59pm, lee@sq.com wrote:

> I am sitting inside FrontPage (say).
> I choose a font for my headings -- Trixie, say.
> This is installed on my system as a TrueType font.

All fine so far

> I press "publish", and FrontPage makes an OpenType subsetted font

Assuming you have licensed it for embedding and not just, say, for
printing your own paper documents.

> that's
> a TrueType font based on Trixie, and saves it for me, including a relative
> URL in the style sheet.

Right.

> Now, if FrontPage is creating the signature,  we have a problem that you
> now have software that is a Digital Thief, staling fonts for you.
> If it can't, where does the signature come from?

I gather that a third party is involved which does an online signing
- you send the signature that says you get to do this, and they send the
signature for your subsetted trixie font.

> > Other sites pointing to those fonts would not work. Well that is the
> > theory as I understand it.
>
> This would be true if
> (1) you had purchased an OpenType font (can't yet)

Or you had purchased an additional license for your existing font to
allow you to do new things with it.

> (2) you had bought the font for use only on a specific domain or URL,e.g.
>     so that you could publish your web site using your corporate font, but
>     could not do internal marketing literature with it (oops)
>     (so the idea is that you buy all your fonts twice?)

No, but you might buy multiple licenses for them.

>    3b] the receiving software is newer than OpenType and is smart enough
>    to understand that it shouldn't let you use it,

no, it is smart enought to know how to present credentials to the 3rd party.
If it can't do that, you can't create the OpenType font.

> and honest enough to implement that, and has no override.

Honesty doesn't come into it. You can either present a signed assertion
to the third party or you can't.

>    Of course, if your own domain changes, you have to buy new fonts.  oops.

I wonder what it does with redirects ;-)

> Since Microsoft doesn't (yet) have the graphic design market, and won't
> until colour management is fixed in Windows xx,

(Aside - the 'made for Win97' logo program includes a requirement that
the monitor has an ICC profile for use with the CMS.)

> I expect that the people who care
> most about the appearance of fonts will decide whether TrueDoc looks OK
> in netscape, and, if so, use it -- and for the rest of the market, the
> extra quality of the lossless fonts will be irrelevant if you have to
> go through lots of hassle.

Recall that you do have to buy a converter to make your TrueDoc font

> One obvious trick would be to "encrypt" the font with its URL on publishing
> it, so that the font would not work in _any_ existing software directly,
> and combining that with other techniques.

Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

>  Another would be to use a wholly new font format -- e.g. based on GX.

;-) 'wholly new' based on % market penetration, is that?



-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Tuesday, 18 February 1997 14:30:39 UTC