Re: EPUB and fonts

Thanks for this pointer, Sylvain. For a while I've thought it odd that the eBooks people don't seem to talk to web people so this is good news.

Chris, perhaps could you remind us how much interest or influence W3C has, officially and unofficially, in the eBook world.

On a slightly related note, I wonder if W3C has a collective opinion on how webfonts should be handled in the "save as complete webpage" feature of modern browsers. (Well, it's one way to make an eBook.) In my tests, Firefox, Safari and Chrome (latest Mac stable releases) are all fine with data URI fonts. Firefox and Chrome fail on linked font files, but Safari actually stores a remote webfont as a font/ttf MIME resource inside the .webarchive.

- L

On 1 Nov 2010, at 14:07, Sylvain Galineau wrote:

> We had a chat with the EPUB liaison during the CSSWG meeting at TPAC today. 
> 
> The following link describes the documents being worked on by EPUB currently : http://www.idpf.org/specs.htm.
> 
> Of particular interest is the 'Font Mangling Specification' at http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/informationaldocs/FontManglingSpec_2.0.1_draft.htm.
> 
> This is merely a font obfuscation mechanism for the purpose of embedding fonts in the EPUB package (a zip file):
> 
> "The proposed mechanism will simply provide a stumbling block for those who are unaware of the license details of 
> the supplied font. It will not prevent a determined user from gaining full access to the font. Given the original 
> OCF publication, it is possible to apply the algorithms described in this document to extract the raw font file. 
> Whether this satisfies the requirements of individual font licenses remains a question for the licensor and licensee."
> 
> Given that EPUB and Web Fonts WG reps are present at TPAC this week, I think it'd be ideal for this WG to discuss
> the issue and start engaging our peers at EPUB on the matter.
> 
>

Received on Monday, 1 November 2010 23:22:56 UTC