Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts? 315
dotne writes "Microsoft has submitted Embedded OpenType (EOT) to W3C and a slimy campaign for EOT has been launched. EOT is a DRM layer on top of normal TrueType/Opentype files; EOT ties a font file to a certain web page or site and prevents reuse by other pages/sites. Microsoft's IE has supported EOT for years, but it has largely been ignored due to the clumsiness of having to regenerate font files when a page changes. Now that other browsers are moving to support normal TrueType and OpenType on the web (Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Prince), W3C is faced with a question: should they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"
Loaded question (Score:5, Funny)
Gee, I wonder what
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Funny)
35% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
4% will think "Microsoft should do whatever it pleases, nothing has stopped it from doing that anyway."
The remaining 1% will be various trolls and flamebait.
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I WANT ICE CREAMSHOE LACES!!!
non-sequitor... (Score:2)
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the majority of responses will be:
"Why do I need all these flashy fonts on the web anyway! I have my browser show every website in Courier 10, and daggummit, that's the way every site should be! Back when I was a kid we didn't have none of these fancy fonts and we were all happier. Websites with Flash on them are basically Satan!!! GET OFF MY LAWN!"
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Funny)
5% will think "That depends on how much money Microsoft spends to pack voting bodies with sock puppets."
10% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
50% will think "Microsoft will do whatever it wants anyway."
90% will be various trolls and flamebait.
Disclaimer: totals do not add to 100% because some contestants qualify for more than one category. Contents may have settled in shipping. 186,000 miles a second.... it's not just a good idea, it's the law. No animals were harmed in testing this product. Fnord.
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"Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?" Gee, I wonder what /. will think...
It's interesting to note that the linked page [cnet.com] has absolutely nothing to do with EOT; rather, it refers to Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web.
Besides, this is quite old news - I certainly knew about it several months ago, and the submission website [w3.org] says it was submitted in March, over five months ago.
Not sure (Score:2, Funny)
It will depend on how "slimy" the campaign for EOT is. If something is slimy enough [slashdot.org], /. actually thinks it's cool.
/. will never get tired of watching "Ghostbusters".
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course we need options/extensions to over ride fonts when the Myspace-Unreadability-Guild (TM) figures out that black on black in weird grunge font looks good.
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want your fancy font! If my browser wants to use foo-font regular, point 10, I want it to be able to.
If you are more worried over presentation, HTML may not be the media for you.
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is that a lot of webpages break when you change the font, text boxes will overflow, menubars will no longer fit and all kind of misery will result. To bad that Firefox doesn't have a button to fix those issues, since overflowing textboxes really don't look like a thing that should ever happen, no matter how crappy a webpage might be.
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think the GPs point was that letting designer's pick a specific font is better than them deciding to use an image instead of text
Which is why most images (at least at some point) on the web contain only text. This is obvious if you ever used or were victim [linuxforums.org] to the infamous [kumar.net.in] Webcollage screensaver [mandrivausers.org] (the "porn screensaver"), which displayed randomly selected images from the web. You get a screen full of random text and porn. Not a good impression to leave for your new college roommate when you leave for class right after your fresh RH9 install.
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need to be a print designer to want more fonts. The list of "safe" fonts that can be expected to work reliably in most web browsers includes:
Arial
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS
Courier New
Georgia
Impact
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
That's it. NINE fonts for BILLIONS of web sites.
I'm not a print designer. But I make lots of web pages, and damn it, nine fonts is not enough. Typography is the single most powerful and versatile design tool in existence. You can use it to convey emotion, to highlight important bits of a page, to subtly improve reading comprehensibility, and on and on.
Not to mention the specialty uses. Have you ever tried to transliterate Egyptian hieroglyphs on the web? I have [glyphics.info], and I had to go the sIFR route to represent characters which are just not available, such as the character shaped like a 3 representing a palatal A sound.
And then there's stuff like medieval transcriptions. How can I post a good transcription of a Middle English romance [utexas.edu] without the characters thorn, eth, yogh, and wynn? Some of those are available in standard fonts, especially thorn and eth, but yogh and wynn are a lot harder to come by. You can get them using Junicode [sourceforge.net], but only if your visitor happens to have that particular font installed, which 99.99999% of people do not. sIFR isn't really a solution in that case, because you only need four damn characters, repeated at intervals throughout a fairly lengthy text.
But hey, 640K should be enough for anyone!
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Informative)
You only need 3 fonts. A serif, a san-serif, and a fixed width. For English at least.
Re:Loaded question (Score:4, Informative)
You're doing it wrong. Both yogh [wikipedia.org] and wynn [wikipedia.org] have unicode code points. They work [fileformat.info] just fine [fileformat.info] here.
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need.
SARCASM
Ah! That explains why word processing software like MS Word, OpenOffice.org and AbiWord only offer those same nine fonts, and there is no more advanced print design software. The next time I see Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign running, I'll be sure to treat them as the hallucinations they are. Thanks for clearing up those mysteries. END SARCASM
I direct your attention to the following:
1) The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird. He has formal graphic design training, wrote a book on the topic, and does not appreciate having his options limited to nine fonts.
2) The Non-Designer's Design Book and The Non-Designer's Typography Book, both by Robin Williams. She's not only a trained graphic designer who has written several books on the topic, but one who works primarily in print. She loves her typography, and really hates the limited nature of fonts on the web (see The Non-Designer's Web Design Book for that).
I wouldn't WANT anything else used as the primary font. Imagine having to read paragraphs of crap using FancySwirlyCrap.ttf, because some designer thought it was cool. Ugh, no f'ing thanks.
Sure. People will make crappy web pages with crappy designs that hurt your eyes. Guess what? They already do. I'd tell you to go browse MySpace for a couple hours, but I'm not that cruel.
Meanwhile, the good designers who know what they're doing are crippled.
Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.
The list is that way because of Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web program, initiated in 1996. The basic aim of the program was to give web designers some kind of consistent control over the typography in their sites -- prior to that time, you just had to pick a font and take your chances.
Readability was one consideration in the list of fonts they settled on, sure. But the basic aim was to improve designer's control over the default fonts. It achieved that goal well. And now it's time to move on.
Happily, it looks to me as though this is going to happen, regardless of whether everyone likes it or not. I'm sure they'll give you a configuration setting to turn off web fonts, though, so you can go on reading Times New Roman and Arial until the end of your days if you'd like.
Happily? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean because the W3C was too stupid or lazy to provide a solution without the ridiculous layer of DRM?
I mean, I get that designers shouldn't be limited to an arbitrary set of 'approved' fonts. But what's the point of adding t
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
And web design may not be for you. Set your damn user style sheet and it'll override whatever attractive layout the designer provided for you with whatever ugly font you want.
I'm not a designer, but let's stop pretending it's 1995.
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One very small company I work for simply has its name in Bangle on a blue background. Since only few people have it on their computer and since it's not free I have to cre
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If you are worried over accessibility, HTML may not be the media for you.
Right, who cares about accessibility in the World Wide Web anyway?
FFS...
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are worried over semantics, HTML may not be the media for you.
If you are worried over accessibility, HTML may not be the media for you.
Where did you come up with this? The main focus of web standards in the last 5+ years has been making the markup more semantic and more accessible—hell, that's one of the main purposes of CSS. Now please leave the web design profession.
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I'll show you. I'm going to make tiny .png's of each letter and lay them out as images.
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
Use font-family, do NOT specify a font for me. I, or my browser, will choose the font.
My page, my design. But feel free to use a browser that does anything you want to the pages you want to display. But the vast majority of the rest of the world likes visiting well-designed pages.
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A well designed page has no care for the specific font that is used, only the style of font and size.
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
A well designed page has no care for the specific font that is used, only the style of font and size.
No, that's a particular *design option* that may or may not be important to the design specification. In certain other cases, it's important to exercise tight control of the maximum width of some text, and that requires specifying the font. For example, I might have a news site with a headline box, and I want each headline to fit on one line without line-breaking and making it look crappy (with a bunch of lines with a single word on each second line). Now, if someone chooses to change the fonts, then it degenerates the way it degenerates. But for most of the world, it will look like a clean, polished design.
And no, not every page needs to be auto-sizing to the width of the browser... that's also a design option that may or may not be appropriate for every design.
Unfortunately, too many people think that the whole concept of "the HTML dictates the content, and the browser dictates the look" from the far past is somehow carved in stone tablets given by God. It's not. The point of a browser is to communicate with a web site, and there are a lot of different ways to do that.
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Unfortunately you cannot do that even if you could embed a font, different browsers and operating systems render fonts slightly differently which will cause the text to be too wide in some cases. If you really need to create such a textbox please use images or Flash, preferrably make a design that can handle variable sized contents. I might be biased, but I need to do webdesign for Finnish and have to live with words like 'sarjakuvafestivaaleilla' which wont wrap nicely into 50pix wide columns.
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Unfortunately, too many people think that the whole concept of "the HTML dictates the content, and the browser dictates the look" from the far past is somehow carved in stone tablets given by God. It's not. The point of a browser is to communicate with a web site, and there are a lot of different ways to do that.
Right, the point of the web is communication. Anything that hinders communication is antithetical.
I'm all for lovely design, don't get me wrong, but PDF is a better language to describe layout than
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Yay! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Funny)
I haven't been so excited since JWZ came up with BLINK.
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in IT for a summer when I was in college. The company's art department always needed much more powerful computers than the others. As I was setting the machines up, I discovered why they needed such fancy hardware. It was all the damn fonts! Those things made the machines so slow, it was ridiculous.
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Re:Yay! (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US. Microsoft etc get round that by copyrighting the "font software", ie they argue that the .ttf file is actually a computer program that displays the font, and that computer program as distinct from the font design it dispays is copyrightable.
Srsly? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US
Really? So if I make a program that takes an Adobe font, renders it into very high resolution raster, do edge detection on that, and write back my own TTF file, I can freely redistribute them? No design patents or anything?
Beware of trademarks (Score:5, Informative)
Don't use the same name, they're usually Trademarked.
And if you copied 100% of the size hinting, they would claim you were copying the program portion.
But, in essence, yes.
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That's why they're so eager to cling to DRM.
Right, cause noone who already has copyright to "protect" their work has ever tried for DRM in addition... Oh wait, that would be almost all the uses for DRM so far.
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PDF (Score:2)
If you want precise fonts, use PDF.
As far as I know, PDF has supported embedded fonts from the start. There are some people who obsess over fonts embedded in their PDF documents and using exactly the right font, and what's the impact?
Most people don't even notice.
Trying to turn HTML into PDF has never worked well.
If it doesn't even make a difference for PDF, why should we care?
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On top of that, this can sort of be correlated to the holocaust of the GNOME stupidity debate. Why should the people who
Re:PDF (Score:4, Insightful)
But fonts can do a lot of things nonetheless: they might contain drop-caps that don't turn into a nasty pixelated mess when printed,
like this [mandarindesign.com]?
Why should the people who do want nice features and customization be forced to suffer because the majority simply doesn't care or won't notice?
Are you talking about PDF, or HTML?
If you want to deliver a print-quality document, use a format that's designed for print-quality output, like a Postscript derivative like PDF, not one that's designed for readability on a huge variety of display devices at the cost of accurate rendering.
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and the half-implemented scheme Apple designed for Leopard.
Hey, Apple's been half-implementing that stuff for two decades! :)
OSX, nee OpenStep (nee NeXTStep), has been using resolution-independent display (DPS, DPDF) forever. Their GUI elements just don't support it yet. Word is they'll be getting off their butts to fix this for Snow Leopard. We'll see.
Expecting everyone to use PDFs for their eighty-bazillion DPI laz0r-displays or live with 72-DPI images standing in for what should be high-res vectors is
DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Next they'll have DRM on colors.
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Funny)
Pantone would love that!
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As would UPS.
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Dibs on #GGGGGG. I'll make a killing on HDR websites.
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Not to mention Family Guy fan sites. :)
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright on fonts makes a lot of sense, just as for music, novels, films and a lot of other stuff.
DRM, on the other hand, sounds like a thoroughly nasty idea; in jurisdictions with crazy laws like the DMCA, it could even make free software web browsers (that come with source code so you can modify them) illegal, just as free programs to play DVDs have been made illegal.
Only in an ideal world... (Score:2)
Copyright on fonts makes a lot of sense
In an ideal world I'd agree. However the way things seem to be going I'd be dead against it because some corporate lawyer would find away to make me pay to use my own handwriting.
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This may come as a shock, but professionally-designed fonts can actually take a year or two to perfect. In terms of effort involved in creating them, DRM on music is probably more absurd.
This may come as a shock, but professionally-designed websites can actually take a year or two to perfect. In terms of effort involved in creating them, DRM on HTML and JavaScript has proven to be unnecessary.
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No, no, no. You don't DRM colors. You trademark them [slashdot.org].
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Now, that's not to say that DRM has a place in web fonts, and that's certainly not to say that EOT is the way to implement it. Comparing a font to a color, tho
Home Depot claimed a color was copyrighted (Score:2)
Chose a Ralph Lauren color chip. Went to Home Depot to have it mixed in their brand of paint. They refused. Said the color was copyrighted. Asked a different staff member on a different day - same response. This is in Canada, where despite stronger copyright law in many areas this kind of silliness seems to be rarer.
IANAL, but I don't believe the law supports the copyright of a color (a collection of colors might be a different matter). That's in theory. Practice, unless you have buckets of cash for
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Don't they SELL Ralph Lauren paint there? That might have something to do with it.
You should take it to a paint store like Sherwin Williams where they sell their own brand, or at least cut off all the identifying information that shows its a Ralph Lauren color.
At the very worst, buy the smallest quantity, put some on a hunk of wood or sheetrock and then take it in to a paint store and have them match the actual paint.
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Interesting)
To be honest, the DRM on fonts is a bit overblown. To create an EOT, you must supply the *beginning* part of the URL to which the font is bound. This is, unfortunately, done with DNS.
That said, if you created "MyDomain1.com", "MyDomainCool.com", "MyDomainIsBest.com", etc., you would need only to generate an EOT bound to "http://mydomain" and it works on all those domains I listed.
Now, though I've said these things, I will also say that EOT is terrible, having worked with it off and on for several years. I'm *dying* for true web fonts in CSS to finally take hold.
One thing many people posting here forget is all the foreign character sets that are not necessarily represented with fonts on an end-user's system. Good luck displaying all of Pashto on an English Win2k machine without (1) fonts installed directly on the machine or (2) web fonts.
Doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
The spec for W3C can say whatever it wants. If the standards body makes a mistake, like blessing useless DRM where it doesn't belong, the rest of the web will kindly ignore the stupid standard. Seriously, IE isn't standards compliant, what would keep Mozilla, Safari, any of the other browsers from simply ignoring this?
How about the fact that being standards compliant is one of the main advantages that Mozilla, Safari, and other browsers currently have over IE? IE ignoring W3C standards has significantly weakened the usefulness of the standards. If other browsers are forced to also begin ignoring the standards due to BS like this being adopted then the existence of the standards will become pointless.
Your browser doesn't support ANSI X3.64! (Score:5, Funny)
Just because a standard exists ^[1mdoesn't^[0m mean it has to be supported.
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No, when it comes to something as major as the web, all major standards (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) need to be adhered to by the standards.
Assuming you mean what I think you were trying to say (...by the standard browsers? Something like that?), where do you get the idea that this embedded font scheme is a "major standard"?
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Indeed - support for @font-face [webkit.org] is already here in Safari and is being considered for Firefox.
font-face (not this MS EOT font stuff) is a real boon for web typography - I just wish the W3C had asked some designers/typographers their opinions earlier in the standards process, as currently type on the web is really poor. As for EOT - they tried that years ago, and it didn't take off because of.... DRM. I don't see what they think will be different this time round.
Here's hoping other browser manufacturers simp
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Designers would certainly love the option (I'm not a designer and I would, as I frequently implement someone else's design and hate the whole thing of slicing images of text in an unsupported font), but I envision font designers throwing a shit-fit. All of those non-standard fonts that you have to drop into place with a png (or sIFR) are, in theory, licensed by the designer, so I do understand where they're coming from.
Now almost by design, anything closed-source or DRMed on the web is destined to fail, gi
what is the point? (Score:2, Redundant)
Why not just assume that it will get cracked, then not implement DRM in the first place?
Point isn't DRM, but the leverage provided (Score:5, Insightful)
The DRM itself isn't the point. The point is the leverage that DRM provides, when combined with dubious things like the DMCA and the BSA. The point is that this gives MS one more club with which to beat people. "Our unannounced raid on your offices shows that you've used our fonts without authorization. Under the provisions of the DMCA, you are now liable for criminal charges ... or we could instead graciously *license* those fonts to you for the mere sum of US$200K, and forget this ever happened."
The DRM itself is not the point. It is merely the means to another end.
Cheers,
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Untrue. BD+ hasn't been cracked, but it hasn't really been used yet. Most BDs still use the same DRM HD-DVD used. (I forget what it's called.)
Most web sites use Windows standard fonts anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
If you design a web site, you want it to show up looking roughly the same on most browsers. For simplicity's sake, most people use the standard fonts (and Mac equivalents).
http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html [ampsoft.net]
If we're going to be embedding fonts, obviously we want as few boring, cumbersome procedures as possible. Forcing us to regenerate pages to approve font use counts as one of these.
Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree on this one.
Re:Most web sites use Windows standard fonts anywa (Score:3, Insightful)
If you design a web site, you want it to show up looking roughly the same on most browsers. For simplicity's sake, most people use the standard fonts (and Mac equivalents).
That's deeply foolish, you know. Users can (and do) set their own style sheets, and they are even more likely to change the size of the fonts in use. Expecting a page to look exactly as someone designed it to be is silly; "web designers" need to get used to the fact (and I've been going on about this on and off since before such a job description existed).
Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
W3C should decline, forcefully. And tell those font designers to deal with the protections on their fonts the same way everyone else deals with protections on their copyright-protected works: when you notice it, sue.
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This isn't a problem anymore (Score:4, Interesting)
Bad idea (Score:2)
If we allow people to use custom fonts, they'll just start using weird fonts for internationalization instead of unicode. They'll lie and claim to be 8859-1, and in the end, we'll just return a web of babel.
Completely ineffectual DRM (Score:2)
I've read the EOT spec [w3.org]. The DRM is trivally, hilariously bad:
In addition, whilst it is possible to embed only those glyphs needed, anyone who's using a CMS is realistically going to be embedding all th
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I suspect it's a "You knew it was wrong." feature. It's not intended to stop people from stealing the data so much as to make it impossible for them to claim they didn't know they weren't supposed to. Much like a simple chain-link fence with a locked gate: the lock isn't really stopping anybody, it's trivial to jump/climb over the fence and bypass the lock completely, but there's no way you can do that and claim you didn't realize somebody intended access to be restricted. Same thing here, if your software
Embedded OpenType (EOT) (Score:2)
OpenType.
Hey Microsoft, "Open", you keep using that word but I don't think it means what you think it means.
DRM doesn't make sense for any standard (Score:5, Insightful)
W3C shouldn't do it, but not merely because DRM is harmful to everyone. There's a deeper reason. They shouldn't do, because it doesn't make sense.
The whole point of standards is to have a spec that anyone can implement, such that differing implementations of different parts, will interoperate.
The whole point of DRM is to PREVENT interoperable implementations!
It's not just dumb to put DRM in a standard; it's a contradiction to put DRM in a standard. If the DRM works, then it's not a standard, and if it's a standard, then the DRM doesn't work.
SIFR (Score:2)
If this helps get rid of the complete abomination that is SIFR [wikipedia.org], I'm all for it.
You've got to appreciate the fact that it actually works, but it is such a giant hack...
Brimming Over with Wrongability (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus, we don't even need to get to the copy protection issue -- the mere idea of binding fonts to an HTML page at all is utterly laughable on its face. It belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what HTML is and the set of problems it's intended to address.
If image is more important to you than content, then go play with PDF -- that's what it's for -- and leave HTML alone.
Schwab
A no brainer (Score:2)
required reading (Score:3, Informative)
See the Wikipedia article and the W3C team comment on the submission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_OpenType [wikipedia.org]
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/01/Comment [w3.org]
No different than photos on the Web (Score:2)
Why isn't this an issue with rights-encumbered photos and images on the web?
You can buy photos today. Some are licensed for a Web audience, some are not. There are technologies to find illegal use of photos out there, and more coming.
Fonts can be same way - either licensed for a Web audience, or not. It should be trivial to detect those that abuse such licensing, much more so than images.
So - what is so special about fonts that they require the DRM treatment? Let the free market sort it out. If paying for W
I think artists, typographers, etc should be paid (Score:4, Funny)
This isn't DRM - read the spec (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, there are embedding flags (EOT spec, 4.1 [w3.org]). These are essentially a machine-readable copyright and license statement - it is absolutely trivial to manipulate this field. You could do it in a few dozen lines of code in the programming language of your choice, with no need to reverse engineer, drag out keys, whatever.
In short, nothing to see here. This slashdot article makes a big deal out of absolutely nothing.
10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..." (Score:3, Interesting)
Font designers are not going to allow their creations to be installed and used for free on a million PCs.
Who cares...
The question here is whether or not we want the special fonts.
I won't use it anyway.
And BTW, that "monopoly" was greatly aided by the early Linux desktop adopters.
What in the name of Turing's Sainted Mother are you talking about?
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Actually, I care, because it's already too damned hard to specify that you want your pages rendered in a san-serif font as it is. What kind of sick weirdo decided that Times Roman was a sane default? If I was god of the Internet BODY { font-style: san-serif; } would DTRT. But no, you have to maintain an ever-growing font-family list...
if you're old enough, remember what what Linux desktops used to look like before 2003.
I'm old enough to remember what UNIX desktops looked like before 1973, kid, but my free U
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uh, it's a proven fact that serif fonts are easier to read but harder to scan.
If you want someone to READ your content then serif... if you just want them to scan then sans... you must be a scanner.
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I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Microsoft.
What does that have to do with anything?
Again, you don't care either way about all this
Where did I say that? My point was that the OP was in that group, not that I was.
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Who cares what font designers say. US copyright law says they have no choice in the matter. Font designs are not copyrightable.
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Perhaps not, but the data files that store the font are copyrightable and are copyrighted. Which means if you embed those font files in your website (maybe you'd like a nice title like Slashdot in something other than Arial), then you're violating copyright law.
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Depends what kind of files you use. Linking to a series of .svg files is most likely fine. .ttf files with all the hinting information could be a problem. You can make your own though with some font creation software and the existing font, and there is nothing they can do about it.
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All right: load the font (not a violation of copyright, as per USC 17.101). Examine its outlines and re-encode them separately. For bonus points, use a different outline format (say, Type 1).
You'll end up with a file that shares none of its bytes with the original file, but that still describes the same font. (Sans hinting, but who needs that these days?) I don't think the new "font program" would qualify as a derivative work because the only commonality between it and the old file is the geometry of the f
Re: (Score:2)
An anomalous decision based on a doctrine of utility and an ancient case fearing the locking-up of communication. The concern is rooted in the pre-digital age when typefaces were far more limited in number. Subsequent case law has been treading deeper into protection of the creative aspects of typeface design, particularly in light of counterexamples in Europe--copyright protection there has increased the competitive marketplace for typefaces and has resulted in no such "lockdown" on information, as the p
The 'DRM hole' (Score:3, Informative)
Any DRM system for 'public distribution' is destined for failure. Why? Because, ultimately, you have to give the end-user some way to decrypt the raw font/music/video/whatever. If the user can decrypt it, there is NOTHING that can technically stop them from extracting the unencrypted data (as long as someone, somewhere, can write an app which pretends to be the 'legitimate app', but in reality does something the 'legitimate app' does not, like offering to save the font data to a file for you).
Encryption wo
Re: (Score:2)
I always found truetype fonts sucked period, and the adobe type1 fonts seemed to render better, especially when printed.
Re:Linux users install MS fonts??? (Score:5, Informative)
I always found truetype fonts sucked period, and the adobe type1 fonts seemed to render better, especially when printed.
From a technical viewpoint, today, there is very little to distinguish the formats. TrueType only does quadratic Bezier curves where Type 1 does cubic, but it is trivial to interpolate cubic curves with quadratic ones, at a slight cost in code size.
When you buy fonts, the higher-quality fonts tend to be in the Type 1 format, but that is for historical reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
[S]hould they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"
Am I missing something? It seems to me that the very thing Microsoft is proposing - a standard for enforcing font file copy rights - is the thing the linked article suggests is necessary to break Microsoft's "monopoly" on web fonts.
I believe the monopoly referenced is MS's monopoly influence on the Web browser and, hence, Web technologies markets.