Re: New work on fonts at W3C

On Jun 22, 2009, at 3:55 PM, Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:

>> I'm not sure this is as impractical as you suggest. Vendors such as
>> Monotype would continue to deliver "normal" fonts, but customers
>> wishing to use those fonts on a web server would be required (by the
>> EULA) to use a tool that replaces the names with "No Trespassing"
>> signs -- how is this more burdensome than having to use a tool that
>> converts the OTF font to EOT?
>
> I find it even hard to imagine that we would ever "ask" our  
> customers to
> do this. In essence, it can only be done by hand, so that the customer
> would be required to obtain or create a font editing tool and manually
> modify the copy of the font.
> To the contrary, conversion to EOT is an automated process, and if  
> EOT,
> or a similar solution, becomes a W3C recommendation, I expect that  
> there
> will be plenty of tools available for web designers to use, possibly
> integrated with CMS so that the font subsetting, EOT conversion and
> compression can all happen behind the scenes when the content is ready
> for production (similar to how it happens with PDF today when you  
> click
> "convert to PDF" button).

This argument makes no sense. A tool that creates an EOT version would  
be no more or less burdensome that a tool that created a renamed OTF  
version. It could even be an online tool where you upload your  
currently licensed font and download a customized copy that can be  
used on the Web.

Using Microsoft's WEFT app to create EOT, on the other hand, was  
pretty annoying and confounding last time I tried. Hardly a user  
interface that could not be improved upon by someone writing a font- 
name-changing app.

If @font=face linking to regular font files becomes a W3C  
recommendation, and some sort of obfuscation or "no trespassing sign"  
is important in order to encourage adoption by commercial foundries  
and font creators, I expect that there will be plenty of tools  
available for web designers to use so that conversion can all happen  
behind the scenes when the content is ready for production (similar to  
how it happens with PDF today when you click "convert to PDF" button).  
It might even work with a modified version of CORS to generate a sort  
of access control list that the server could use to generate CORS  
headers restricting access.

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 06:35:45 UTC