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Tuesday, July 22 10:31 am/ Posted by Si / Permalink
For the first half Adam did a great non-partisan account of the history and various technologies associated with fonts on the Web. It was very clear and concise.
Bill Davis (Ascender) announced fontembedding.com – education around embedding issues, and a possible EOT (Embedded OpenType) business model. How do you charge for EOTs - per hit, web site size? I suggested that thousands of bloggers would be willing to pay $5 to use an embedded version of Gotham (or maybe Optima) on their blogs - the “make EOT” feature on fontembedding.com looks promising as the basis of licensing EOTs.
Ted Harrison (FontLab) announced www.eeulaa.org – latest incarnation of the electronic EULA effort. Christopher Slye voiced concerns around the legal implications. I said that I doubted it would get into OpenType due to these concerns, but another option for supporters of the technology would be to bypass MS and Adobe and take the fight to ISO (not trivial).
In the session the usual issues came up.
Roger Black, Zara Evens – Web designers wanting to use the same fonts as they use in print, for all the same reasons they use different fonts on print – not just branding.
David Berlow’s ideas around tuning fonts for different environments/sizes came up. Didn’t get explored very deeply – the discussion was more focused on delivery mechanisms.
Erik van Blokland raised the issues about crashing Mac OS with rogue fonts – speculated that we’ll see the feature off-by-default in the future.
Si (me) – Using EOT gives an option that prevents casual/trivial re-use of embedded fonts. But isn’t a silver bullet. However, as an open-standard it can be expanded on EOT v2 – developed by the community could improve on issues like security and usefulness of extracted font data. Christopher Slye (Adobe) said EOT is on par with PDF embedding in terms of security.
Calls to action
Font makers, review font embedding.com and take a position on EOT embedding / raw font linking etc., maybe release select fonts for use under each scheme – put a stake in the ground as to what’s okay and what isn’t.
Web designers, if you agree that raw-font-downloads are not the solution you’re looking for let the W3C know, post to the blogs and newsgroups and if you agree with the positions at http://www.fontembedding.com/ post a link – that will save time in articulating the position again and again.
Please visit Typophile to discuss this further... http://typophile.com/node/47629
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