Re: ascender, descender, cap-height and x-height

Daniel Will-Harris wrote:

> What's more, I personally have yet to see any kind of font
> substitution system that really worked well enough. Panose, by Ben
> Bauermeister (see
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0442211872/o/qid=948938748/sr=8
> -1/104-0822201-5846809 ) is the best system so far, and it has it's
> limitations 

yes

> in that fonts themselves must have the Panose numbers
> embedded in them, 

Point of correction - this is completely untrue.

There is no requirement to have this information in the font at all. It can
be placed in a font descriptor in a stylesheet. Same for the x-height and
other descriptors. 

> Far better than encouraging substitutions would be to further promote
> the Dynamic Fonts feature already in Netscape and secure, open font
> embedding. Dynamic Fonts is an excellent and secure system that's
> unfortunately rarely used, even though tools to create these fonts
> are readily available.

Feedback that I have received from web designers - in answer to my "why
don't you use the CSS2 WebFonts feature" (of which the Netscape/Bitstream
PFR embedding is a partial implementation) mainly centers around four
perceptions.

1) they feel the tool costs to much (around US$300)
2) they are concerned over the legality of transmitting these derived fonts
3) they want one mandated format that is universally supported, rather than
having to make .pfrs for Netscape and .eot for IE
4) they dont like the rasterisation/hinting/kerning/some other aspect of
the downloadable fonts and would rather get the exact pixels they like and
send down an image

I take no position on whether these are good or true reasons but its what
people tell me their reasons are.

Received on Thursday, 27 January 2000 18:02:31 UTC