- From: Michael Emmel <mike@jmaca.com>
- Date: Mon, 09 Feb 1998 09:34:53 -0700
- To: dank@alumni.caltech.edu, java2d-intrest@sun.com, www-font@w3.org
Dan I read your web page. http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/javafont.htm But I think your missing the real problem Its not Javasoft. The problem is fonts are proprietary. Plus there is a strong precedence for control of font readers creators and where and how they display there glyphs. Downloaded fonts being a big problem. Javasoft for convince want's to use Adobe and MS fonts that are available on each machine unfortunately they cannot allow uninhibited redistribution via java because of copyright. I would be extremely hesitant to build the technology that would allow trivial transmission and use of fonts with todays copyrights. As you know the browsers are barley able to use downloaded fonts in a crippled way. This is not sufficient for a real program. With the new "web" old style proprietary fonts are as crippling as Microsoft controlling all web browsers. The only answer in my opinion is to develop a new free font technology in Java. With "fonts" represented by serialized objects. The creation of a "Font" object is font file/Tool dependent but after that it is trivial to simply serialize the font objects. One simply has to use freely available fonts. Bitmap fonts are easy. I have not yet worked on "outline" fonts but they are also quit doable. You just have to come up with a serialization scheme. And since the object knows how to recreate itself this scheme need not be standard. There are tons of free fonts out there so there is nothing preventing you from creating enough to satisfy basic programing needs. These serialized objects can be read by "c" programs if you had too. Its actually fairly trivial the only real problem is in the beginning you will have to avoid all the copywrited fonts until they become irrelevant. Adobe won't change its copyright policy until consumers demand it. This is the way to break the "Font" monopoly IMHO. Just do it : ) Mike mike@jmaca.com
Received on Monday, 9 February 1998 11:25:58 UTC