RE: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts

David Wooley wrote:

"I don't think commercial content producers for the web consider things
like images to be web resources.  They rather consider them to be part
of a compound document...."

I think you're right, and I think that they would view fonts the same way.

Jon Tan writes of EOT:

"Hinting for web browser rendering could get complex with multiple formats.  If all typefaces had to be tested in both EOT and OTF formats, wouldn't it create extra work?" (Then goes on to describe a problem.)

EOT is just a wrapper. It has no effect on hinting or rasterization - nor would any of the other proposals we've been kicking around. Any rendering problem you see after sticking a font in EOT should have also happened with the original font, if placed in the same rendering environment.

Finally, a note on piracy issues. Although uses of fonts on web sites could be theoretically detected by a web-crawler, this is not terribly useful for detecting piracy of fonts. The most glaring issue is the simple one that font vendors are equally or more worried about people using the web to get the fonts, and then using them in print. The pirated usage need not be on the web at all.

But let's say that I see that font Glurbish is used on Glorb.com's web site. But Glurbish is available from me and at least one other licensor, and each of us has no access to the others' customer lists. I believe this situation is true for a mild majority of "retail licensed fonts" in the world.

There are other complications besides, like fonts being licensed in the name of an individual who uses it in their work for a company, but you get the idea....

Regards,

T

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 04:57:09 UTC