Re: Merits and deficiencies of EOT Lite (was: Combining ZOT with .webfont metadata)

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Christopher Slye<cslye@adobe.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 27, 2009, at 1:06 PM, Sylvain Galineau wrote:
>
>>> In the meantime, those who want to continue discussing the merits and
>>> deficiencies of EOT Lite should do so.
>>
>> I look forward to hearing about the real merits or deficiencies of
>> Ascender's proposal, preferably based on evidence and use-cases. Some of the
>> perceived or made-up ones that have been brought up before are not worth any
>> further consideration.
>
> One of the professed advantages of EOT Lite is its existing "installed base"
> (i.e. Internet Explorer). However, for those who are more interested in
> CFF-EOT fonts, there are significant and well-known deficiencies in the
> Windows/IE platform. Acknowledging that these deficiencies are bugs and/or
> "should be fixed" is something, but obviously it is more valuable to know
> that they *will* be fixed soon (to the extent that they can be fixed at
> all).
>
> Win/IE's problems with CFF are relevant for any web font format (or raw
> fonts, for that matter), but it seems obvious that MS is going to have to
> "walk the walk" if it wants to see EOT be more than a niche solution. I
> think Ascender has done MS a great favor by giving EOT a second wind as EOT
> Lite, but it's DOA if the CFF issues persist.

While Adobe does use CFF fonts (and has expressed that it has no
interest in releasing in any other format), I believe most foundries
distribute in TTF, at least as an option.  (I know that all or nearly
all of the fonts on my computer are TTF.)  So any issues with CFF
fonts are at most minor in the short term.  In the long term the
'installed base' argument is no longer valid, and we can judge formats
more evenly.

And, I apologize for reiterating, while EOT (and thus EOT-Lite) may
have trouble with CFF fonts in legacy IEs, a newly-created format has
trouble with *all* formats in legacy clients.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 27 July 2009 22:52:26 UTC