RE: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts - new compromise proposal

Hi Tom,

Please see below. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-style-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Phinney
> Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 11:47 PM
> To: www-style@w3.org
> Subject: RE: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts - new compromise proposal
> 
> 
> I have many questions relating to this and to previous discussion....
> 
> First, thanks to whoever a few days ago tried to set me 
> straight on how access control works. I still have a bunch of 
> questions about that. Let's call the site with the font the 
> "local site" and other sites interested in using it "remote sites."
> 
> 1) Who turns access control on? Is it essentially up to the 
> browser vendors to decide a given class of resource should 
> have access control on by default?
> 
> 2) Can remote sites avoid the access control restrictions 
> simply by adding a word or two to the HTML referencing the 
> remote font?
> 
> 3) Why is nobody worried about access control being a 
> DMCA-covered issue? Not just for fonts, but for any resources 
> that use it? Is it because the answer to my question #2 above 
> is "yes"?
> 
> 4) An unrelated question for Vlad: I thought MTX compression 
> only applied to TTF? Can one use it on OpenType CFF as well, 
> just without compressing the CFF table (because it's already 
> compressed)? Or would it be some sort of extension to the MTX 
> spec to apply it to CFF?
> 

The original MTX compression has been developed in mid-90 (i.e. in
pre-historic OT times) for TT fonts only. The compressor applies special
knowledge of all font tables to pre-process the font before doing
entropy coding, and then decompressor reverses that. Since OT today
shares the same font tables for both OT/TT and OT/CFF fonts, the answer
is yes - MTX compressor can be used on OpenType CFF fonts as well, all
we need to do is to add a couple of lines of code to add CFF table into
the mix. Like you said, the CFF table is already compressed, so the
compressor will simply add it to the compressed data stream "as is" and
the decompressor will put it back into the output font. All other tables
will be compressed the same way they are processed for OpenType TT
fonts.

Regards,
Vlad


> Also, I just wanted to concur with Vlad that I don't know of 
> any type foundries (including Adobe) who are eager to 
> restrict people's ability to use FLOSS fonts on the web. We 
> just don't want our retail fonts to be handled the same way, is all.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> T
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 14:41:40 UTC