Arcane Jill writes: > Anyone know the current status on embedded fonts in web pages?
> I basically have two questions. > (1) Assume the existence of a font to which I legally own the > copyright. For example, let's say I invented it. Now, I design > a web page which uses this font. Now, it's easy (but terribly > inconvenient) to say on the web page "Please download and > install this font in order to view this web page correctly", > but the truth is I know damn well that no-one will ever do > that. So, short of using small image files, what's the current > state-of-the-art technical solution to this. > Question (2) is the same as question (1), except that I don't > own the copyright. Suppose, for example I want to use this font > called Garamond. It's on my machine. (I don't know how it got > there - I think it came pre-installed with the OS). But of > course, I can't guarantee that it will be installed on someone > else's machine. And since I don't own the copyright, and don't > have explicit permission to distribute it, I don't think I'm > even allowed to say "Please download and install this font in > order to view this web page correctly". How do we solve this one? Both of your questions are being solved using more innovative embeddable fonts (like the .eot format which allows distributing encrypted glyphs used in a document, without distributing the font, and without allowing to reverse engineer the glyph datas to steal its design). There are several font distribution formats studied to allow embedding fonts without violating copyright: the author must just sign its glyph data which will become usable only in the documents he produces, provided that the author has a legal license to use that font. A solution already exists in PDF documents, which can embed preprocessed fonts that are quite difficult or imposible to reverse engineer completely (for example, composition tables, glyph positioning rules, kerning tables, and so on, are removed from the embedded "fonts" which just contain glyphs simply prepositioned in the PDF document pages). __________________________________________________________________ << ella for Spam Control >> has removed Spam messages and set aside Newsletters for me You can use it too - and it's FREE! http://www.ellaforspam.com
