Re: a basic question

From: "Thomas Lord" <lord@emf.net>
> What is the rationale against a "TTF/OTF plus ____ format"
> proposal?  That would allow the providers of restricted
> license fonts to continue to withhold permission to 
> use their fonts on the web in TTF/OTF.  It would also
> serve well the providers and users of permissively 
> licensed fonts, as well as the makers of software that
> process font files.

There's two reason, as it seems :

* It's too easy to put a licensed font on the web with 
    the OTF format. This destroy the 'protection' given 
    by the other format, as this format is not needed at 
    all and any webmaster can do as if there was no
    protection at all, and even ignoring that there's a 
    protection

* It's not so difficult to create an EOT font from a OTF 
    font, so if you want to use your free open-source font, 
    you can convert it. 

But everyone know that my thought about that is that 
it's too late as 40% of the browser market ignore that 
protection. It's quite stupide to think that one browser 
can provide a protection alone, so I think it would be 
better for all to implements the two formats.

But neither font authoer nor Microsoft seems to think 
the same way. As I fully understand why, it seems 
difficult to make them changing of point of view. To 
get conviced of this, look at the number of mails 
already sent...

Maybe IE could support OTF but it requiers a special 
format like :

    /path/myFont.otf
    (the font)

    /path/myFont.otf.license 
    (a text file that contains a license name, even if 
    it's not the real license, it's a way to provide some 
    protection. People that use wrong license will not 
    find it easy to say after that that they didn't know they
    were using a font without the right)

What do you think of it ? Would you accept to implement
OTF with this limitation.

Received on Monday, 6 July 2009 20:18:51 UTC