RE: Fonts WG Charter feedback

On Wednesday, July 01, 2009 5:15 AM Jonathan Kew wrote:
> 
> On 1 Jul 2009, at 02:37, Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:
> 
> > I want to say that I absolutely support with both hands what Thomas
> > has proposed.
> > I also think there is also a way to merge this and Jonathan's
> > proposal so that we would get "wrapped(compressed(X))", which is
> > both useful as a generic wrapper format and provides real tangible
> > benefits for both authors and users.
> 
> It is not yet clear to me what "real tangible benefits" are provided
> by wrapping fonts, given that fonts can already carry whatever
> metadata you wish to include.

Metadata included in the fonts are specific to particular license. I am thinking that a user-friendly (a la "Help->About ...") metadata would be a significant benefit, that may include the URL where a font license can be purchased. Mind you, this URL would in most cases be different than what is encoded in a font - License info URL and Vendor's link encoded in a font are likely point to an official website (e.g. Bitstream or Monotype) where user-friendly URL would point to web portals that are created for users (like Myfonts.com or Fonts.com, or a font distributor that is not even associated with any particular foundry).

> 
> Perhaps the day will come when all web resources are delivered in a
> standard "wrapper", so that user agents can access and display
> information about them without having to read format-specific elements
> from the resource itself, whether that means the 'name' table in a
> font, the Exif tags in an image, the DocInfo dictionary of a PDF file,
> etc. If that is the goal, though, it should be addressed in a much
> broader context than this group.
> 
> JK

Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 13:09:50 UTC