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

On Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:58 PM Dave Crossland wrote:
> 
> 2008/11/12 Levantovsky, Vladimir 
> <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com>:
> >
> > the second part is font data compression that can also serve as 
> > obfuscated font format. I believe we are in agreement that serving 
> > compressed fonts on the web (and, thus, reducing bandwidth 
> and storage 
> > requirements) would be equally beneficial when using both 
> commercial 
> > and free fonts.
> 
> (Please distinguish free fonts from proprietary fonts; free 
> fonts are often developed commercially eg Ascender's 
> Liberation and Droid)
> 

Dave, I believe we've had enough of these rhetoric on OpenType list, I
don't want to pollute this reflector.

> ROC suggested using gzip as the compression+obfuscation, or 
> developeing an unpatented split-stream font compression 
> method. As a foundry, would Monotype support either of these 
> compression schemes as "good enough" obfuscation?
> 

I can't see how gzip or any other standard utility compression could be
considered an obfuscation - when people buy fonts on our website they
download them in a zip file.

As far as any "to be developed in the future" obfuscation is concerned -
it will be publicly disclosed and completely unprotected. Can it be good
enough? MTX achieves high levels of compression by partially (or
completely) eliminating certain data from an original font and
recreating them on the fly at the decompression stage. I consider this
technique to be rather strong obfuscation - would you agree?

Regards,
Vlad

> Cheers,
> Dave
>

Received on Thursday, 13 November 2008 08:16:41 UTC