Re: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts

On Oct 17, 2008, at 12:40 AM, David Woolley wrote:

>
> Robert O'Callahan wrote:
>> This is not a fact. It is purely speculation. The poor quality of  
>> Microsoft's WEFT tool and the lack of interoperability with other  
>> browsers are just as likely to have been major factors.
>
> I would suggest that the two main reasons were:
>
> 1) image replacement is much more flexible in terms of distorting  
> existing fonts and adding colours (and many interpretations of font  
> copyright say that bitmaps of fonts are exempt from the font  
> copyright);
>
> 2) embedding a font is a technical, non-WYSIWYG process.

Neither is typing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but those technologies  
did not become part of WYSIWYG editors until after they established  
themselves amongst those of us who edit with a text editor. The fact  
is that using WEFT was a terrible process, due to its poor quality.  
There was little or no way to tell, until the end of a lengthy  
process, whether a font would be embedable or if there would be some  
unexplained error.

It is hundreds of times easier to embed a font in a PDF. If it were  
that easy to embed fonts into Web pages, in a way that allowed them to  
be cached for a site, and in a way that allowed quick, progressive  
rendering in the 3 most-used browsers on Windows and Mac, then authors  
would be doing it already.

Assuming, that is, that they could find fonts that did not require  
them to pay for the font a second time for an embedding license. If I  
had an Adobe font that did not allow embedding,  I would rather look  
for a free alternative, by finding a free -- and freely embeddable --  
font that was close enough in character to the original.

> I think one also sees a trend away from embedding in PDF, e.g.  
> people using MSWord Word Art include it without thinking that it is  
> really an image.

I disagree. I see no evidence that any significant number of authors  
are moving away from embedding fonts in PDFs. And I do not see that  
much Word Art in PDFs of professionally created sites.

Received on Friday, 17 October 2008 14:59:23 UTC