Re: Partial fonts

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 8:24 PM, John Hudson<tiro@tiro.com> wrote:
> Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>
>> 3. It's still purely an obfuscation mechanic, with no benefit to us
>> authors.  (Many/most of the other proposals give us at least *some*
>> benefit.)
>
> The benefit to authors of any scheme that offers protection of font data is
> that they might get to legitimately license the typefaces they want to use
> in their documents. That's the benefit the authors get if you can persuade
> the font makers to license their fonts for use in a web format.
>
> Previously, you've made comments that suggest a commodified view of fonts --
> 'If you don't license your fonts to this market, someone else will come
> along and license their fonts instead' --, which misses the whole point of
> what makes any given font desirable: the individual typeface that it
> embodies. Fonts are not interchangeable commodities. What people want, what
> adds value, is the particular typeface that suits their needs. The typeface
> is the benefit, not the format. Just as it always has been. There was no
> 'benefit to authors' in little pieces of metal, or in spinning photodiscs or
> glass negatives, other than the typeface that they embodied.
> Device-independent digital font formats have given users many practical
> benefits that they never had in previous font formats, but it doesn't follow
> from this that 'benefit to authors' is a necessary criterion for a font
> format.

My point in that is that the entire reason for obfuscation mechanisms
(breaking interop with the desktop) can be accomplished equally well
by other methods that do more than just obfuscate (such as
compression).  Thus I'm somewhat against anything that merely
obfuscates.

(EOT gets a pass for its substantial outside benefits.)

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 7 July 2009 02:28:33 UTC