Re: Current Downloadable Font Status....

On Aug 18,  5:22am, Art Pollard wrote:

> I am wondering what the status is of downloadable font technology.  Of
> course, I read the page at W3.org but, the most recent information is the
> press releases from about a year ago (or a bit more).

Guilty. I haven't maintained the public pages (which point out from
W3 to the rest of the world) at all; I have been busy working on
specifications rather than maintaining links to other stuff.

Ignore that page. Now I have been prodded, I will replace it with
something useful as time permits.

Instead, try looking at the Web Fonts draft

  http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-font

This represents work that has been carried out over the last year by
the W3C Font and CSS Working Groups, whose members included Netscape,
Bitstream, Microsoft, Agfa, Adobe, HP and others.

> Apparently, Netscape and M$ seem to have two conflicting proposals.

No, what they have are two partial implementations of the above draft.
They use different font formats, true. That isn't a problem, any more
than one browser understanding JPEG and the other GIF is a problem.
The spec lets you write a stylesheet with links to multiple font
formats, if required.

> Of
> the two, I suspect that M$'s will be available sooner and Netscape's will
> be better designed.  (What's new?)

Care to share the grounds for your suspicions? And actually Netscape
shipped a little before Microsoft in this instance, and both are
available now.

> Does W3 have their own system which is being put together?

Yes and no. Yes, there is a W3C spec. No it isn't "their own system"
as distinct from what Netscape and Microsoft are doing. Instead, it is
exactly what Netscape and Microsoft and the other W3C members have been
designing, and which Netscape and Microsoft have initial implementations
of.


> Are there any
> sources available?  What is the current status of Web font technology?

Improving.

In terms of font usage, the current state is the CSS1 specification. This
gives fine control over fonts, but selects them by name from the client
system. If it ain't installed, you get the next font in the list.

In terms of font specification, for on-the-fly synthesis, intelligent
matching and dynamic download, the Web Fonts draft is the current status.

In terms of font design for online usage, the fonts of various
screen-oriented designers who are seeing past the print-oriented
WYSIWYG mentality is the current state of the art.

In terms of font rendering, hinted anti-aliased greyscale rendering
to generate an alpha map which composits the foreground color (or image)
against the background color (or image) is the current state of the art;
the font smoothing technology in the Windows95 plus pack (on Win32),
SmoothType 1.3 (on the Mac), the Bitstream anti-aliased TrueType,
Type1 and TrueDoc renderers, the BeOS font display system and the
Archimedes RISCOS font system are the current state of the commercial
art. There are also freeware Type1 and TrueType rendering engines out
there; I don't have the references handy right now.

In terms of font formats for online use, OpenType, TrueType GX and
Type1CID have the most impressive capabilities, with TrueDoc PFR and
Agfa Microtype Express ("embedded opentype) being the current
favourite delivery formats.



-- 
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 Monday, 18 August 1997 11:49:13 UTC