Re: progress on mutual understanding

On Jul 6, 2009, at 7:35 PM, Thomas Lord wrote:

> If you will, what conditions would Adobe require
> for "protected font linking", given that others
> of us find "e.g. EOT"  to be too vague a description
> to find sensible?  A great many of varieties of
> "protection" have been discussed.  It would be helpful
> to better understand Adobe's view of the range
> of "acceptable" and "desirable" kinds of "protection".

It's better for me to leave those specifics for another day. It's  
easier to agree on principles, but the details require more scrutiny.  
I know that we would like to resolve some of these questions very soon.

I'll note two things: Adobe previously supported the open EOT  
proposal, so that's a specific case of something we found acceptable.  
Second, it's fair to say that our requirements are not exotic. I think  
that a combination of obfuscation and cross-origin restrictions (of  
some kind) would be "good enough". (There's nothing wrong with  
compression, but we're lucky that CFF compression and subroutinization  
is already built in to our OpenType fonts.) But, of course, the more  
protection the better.

John mentioned something which I think is compelling. It's a shame  
that we can't seem to have (only) a specific web font format. The act  
of converting a "desktop" font to a "web" font, however trivial, does  
constitute a specific act by which a font user must confront their  
permissions. Even if it means converting a free font to a different  
format (wrapper, whatever), it offers the kind of mental threshold  
which I think is helpful in making the user generally aware of what  
they're really doing. That's just the kind of thing that's attractive  
to font foundries, I think.

-Christopher

Received on Tuesday, 7 July 2009 23:13:00 UTC