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

>> 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. 

Thanks for clearing that up. I would imagine, however, that adding it
all in a stylesheet could make them large if you included many fonts
for substitution. If you only had a few faces, like
Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica, no, that doesn't take much space.

>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)

That's true.

>2) they are concerned over the legality of transmitting these
derived fonts

I am only concerned about EOT because in its current implementation,
it's so easy to pull out usable truetype fonts, without any technical
knowledge. I could see concerns about embedding Type 1 fonts, since
they don't have embedding bits.

>3) they want one mandated format that is universally supported,
rather than
>having to make .pfrs for Netscape and .eot for IE

PFR's are supported by both Netscape and IE (at least in the current
versions).

>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

This isn't the answer, especially for the readability of type,
because different screens have different resolutions so sending exact
pixels is not always going to look good on a variety of devices. The
same problem occurs when fonts are set in pixels or points now,
something that makes it extremely difficult for site visitors to
adjust them comfortably for readability.

]) /\ |\| | (- |_

Received on Thursday, 27 January 2000 23:47:09 UTC