- From: Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:32:05 -0700
- To: "Levantovsky, Vladimir" <Vladimir.Levantovsky@MonotypeImaging.com>
- Cc: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com>, Jonathan Kew <jonathan@jfkew.plus.com>, "<www-style@w3.org>" <www-style@w3.org>
On Jun 23, 2009, at 12:02 PM, "Levantovsky, Vladimir" <Vladimir.Levantovsky@MonotypeImaging.com > wrote: > On Tuesday, June 23, 2009 2:12 AM Brad Kemper wrote: >> >> If the font requires some custom @font-face rules in the CSS file in >> order to work well, then that block of CSS could also contain a >> comment explaining the restriction further, along with a sentence >> that >> says, "this text comment block must be included with the @font-face >> rule, unedited, as part of the license requirement." >> >> Furthermore, the single font could be split into two fonts: one with >> the vowels, odd numbers, and punctuation, and the other with the >> consonants and even numbers, and then brought together via @font-face >> unicode ranges and a font-family stack. This would make it pretty >> hard >> to accidentally copy it to another site and have it work, without >> first understanding that they are not supposed to. And it would make >> it pretty difficult to use in other applications that do not have >> @font-face rules. > > A font isn't just a collection of glyphs - it also contains additional > information such as glyph substitution, positioning and layout tables, > kerning, etc. Couldn't such tables and alterate characters and such be kept in one of the fonts (or both) and just have the missing characters pulled from the other font? I thought that would be how Unicode ranges would need to work anyway. > Ligatures, glyph variants and many advanced features that > are necessary to support complex language scripts such as Arabic and > Indic depend on the layout processing - I don't see how you can > split a > font without breaking all this. Many language scripts are syllabic - > how > do you plan to handle those fonts? I was primarily thinking of Latin scripts, but I imagine in other scripts there would be some vital, oft used characters that you could still split between two fonts. > I am also stunned that you seem to be suggesting that web authors > should > go to such a great length and make extra efforts in handling fonts I really wonder if you are being genuine when you say things like that. I see absolutely no reason whatsoever why the tool to split a font in two, rename it, and add a little license info should be any more difficult or less automated to use than a tool like WEFT for creating EOT. It might even be a little easier, since it would also generate the @font-face code block and maybe a sample font-family rule. > when > targeted font compression seem to present much simpler solution - > compress a font that is hosted on a server, and let browser decompress > it before it passes it on to the OS font engine. To me it seems as the > most straightforward and effortless solution, isn't it? Aside from the separate issue of compression, how is that easier than using a tool to "obfuscate a font that is hosted on a server, and let browser de-obfuscate it before it passes it on to the OS font engine"? > > Regards, > Vladimir >
Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 20:40:08 UTC