Re: Downloadable fonts and image replacement

Also sprach David Woolley:

 > > while I'd personally insist that Opera respects the embedding bits of
 > > Truetype, the CSS specification cannot do so. This is the job of the
 > > TrueType specification [1].
 > 
 > I think you are missing a key point, that the fonts are not physically
 > embedded, when the embedding bits assumed that the font would be
 > physically embedded, as they would be in a Word or PDF document.

True, they are independent resources. The job of the browser is to
combine a set of independent resources into coherent "pages" that
appear to come from one source. Based on your observation about fonts
being linked to instead of "physically embedded", what is your
conclusion? That, since they are independent resources, the "embedding
bits" aren't relevant and should be ignored?

I would argue that, while the embedding bits predate the web, the
permission for level 4 fonts to be "permanently installed on the
remote system" [1] is granted even without the font file being
"physically embedded" into a document. It's easy enough to create a
dummy document which "embeds" the font -- I could even argue that a
zip file provides a level of embedding. So, if a TrueType level 4 font
family is being served on the web, I think it's reasonable to use it
to display documents. (I wouldn't install it permanenty on the system,
though, but treat it as a cached resource.)

The description of the other levels are more problematic for web use.
For example, the restriction that "no edits can be applied to the
document" for level 2 fonts is incopatible with browsers that support DOM. 

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Thursday, 27 April 2006 21:00:15 UTC