Rumours of the death of "new, professionally designed typefaces" are perhaps exaggerated?

Hi,

Thomas Phinney wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Thomas
> Phinney<tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>   
> I left out the corollary: if they are correct in their assessment,
> then the creation of new, professionally designed typefaces could dry
> up a few years after this transition to raw TTF/OTF on web sites
Although some font software vendors, aka foundries, are already
* licensing existing TTF/OTF fonts for use on the web, and/or
* making systems that allow this to be done with minimal risk of loss of 
income and maximal opportunity to make money.

So surely they intend to protect their revenue stream, keep on creating 
new, professionally designed typefaces, and move with the times?

I hope that implies that I feel it's a bad thing to remove OTF/TTF 
support in a new spec, whatever might come along to open up the field. 
Having OTF/TTF is such an obviously straightforward and useful facility. 
For those of us involved in creating and using openly licensed fonts 
it's a no-brainer. Especially for the 'minority' scripts that have been 
mentioned once or twice on this list in the last few days.

I feel sorry for MS being so intransigent on this particular point, but 
then everyone in the discussion has their sacred cow. You just saw one 
of mine.

Cheers,
Ben

-- 
Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html

Received on Monday, 3 August 2009 14:06:27 UTC