Re: Web Fonts

>    I was under the impression that only Microsoft supported downloadable
>  fonts, and only via a proprietary format that requires a conversion
> utiltiy. So the issue seems to be the number of implementations that

I think it is more of a DRM tool than a conversion utility.  EOT 
stands for embedable opentype and the main embedability issue
is providing some level of DRM.  In this case, I think it is relative
weak DRM, just listing the allowed sites, to prevent copyright theft
as the result of the normal cut and paste coding that happens on
the web, rather than to protect against a deliberate attempt to 
infringe.

I was under the impression that the specification for the file format
was open, and it is just a variation on OpenType, which, in turn,
is just a wrapper for TrueType and Type 1, to allow a single file
type to contain outlines of either type.  Opentype is certainly
used on open source operating systems.  It is possible that the
list of sites part isn't documented.

The other thing that WEFT, the tool, does is subsetting, which is
partly for bandwidth, but also part of the DRM concept.  One level of
embedding is not editable embedding, in which the font can only be
used for the existing content of the page, not for form input, etc.
By actually subsetting the font, you make it impossible to use it for
general editting (although WEFT does allow custom subsets, which are
useful when bandwidth is the consideration).

> support common/open font formats, not how difficult it is for the
> authors to use.

My guess is that there are no open source clones of WEFT because there
are no browsers that support embeddable fonts, other than IE, and 
WEFT is free of charge to Windows users, and also because there is
not much demand for embedded web fonts.
>

Received on Friday, 18 August 2006 23:25:38 UTC