From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Jan 06 2011 - 20:58:10 CST
As an author you can decide to publish anything you create yourself.
so you create texts, and page designs. But you still depend on works
that you did not create yourself : font designs.
There will be an issue as long as there will be no working system to
allow authors transfering the fonts in a way that is both compatible
to font authors rights, and your own publication rights. Today the
only thing you can do is to use fonts that that be installed by anyone
without restriction, i.e. using free fonts, and to incite all OS
providers to support a usable set of these free fonts that can be
referenced and used without restrictions (I do think that there should
exist a common repository of free fonts that any OS could use in their
installation or OS updates, even if each OS provider gives additional
font designs with their own instalaltion packages).
But for paid fonts, one solution would be a system that allows a font
designer to still sell their fonts, with a licence allowing
redistribution and use in documents made by authors that have
effectively paid for the needed licence.
What this means is that protected fonts should contain some
authentication mechanism, allowing the distribution of documents with
some metadata encoding an authorization key (for example on a specific
domain or subdomain name for the web, or by inclusion of this metadata
key along with an encrypted form of the font in documents like
PDF/DejaVu/ODT/...). The authorization key would be used to perfom
some key exchange request on a web server maintained by the font
author (or by a service provider, like in PKI providers) to get the
necessary decryption key, after asserting that the source domain is
effectively owned by someone that has the appropriate limited
distribution right for the font (i.e. the right to publish documents
created and signed by themselves).
It would really help if the PKI signature keys were not so expensive,
or if all OS distributions contained the right to register a secure
signature on the web, with which you would be able to create documents
containing some necerssary licenced package like fonts (or other
software tools and resources such as images). The need is not limited
to fonts, but more generally on how to track licencing rights on the
web (notably images, videos, music). Some infrastructure is still
missing on the web to manage licences portfolios on the web : this
will involve works by OS authors, collaboration with content creators
and with ISPs (which could also provide secure signatures to authors).
All web users are supposed to be authors sometime, and it's
unbelievable that such need has still not been addressed, so that we
not only have an identity on the web, but also the possibility to
manage a portable portfolio of licences, usable independantly of the
ISP).
But the other part of the problem, specific to fonts, is that there's
a real lack of software solutions that allow people to design the
fonts they want for their documents (even if they are not as complete
and perfect as professional fonts).
We have now tons of SVG images, with lots of tools used to draw them,
and still very few softwares that allow packaging a set of SVG glyphs
into some workable font, because the existing tools are really too
much complex to use. Yes the hinting process is really complex for
most users, however for most users just creating documents, it should
not be necessary to create complex fonts that will scale gracefully at
all sizes, when their need is to create documents that will be
readable at reasonnable sizes for display or printing.
In the past we had basic font editors where people could design bitmap
fonts easily. Those tools have mostly disappeared because we are too
much used to a very small set of existing TrueType/OpenType fonts with
high quality provided with OSes, but still lots of interoperability
problems with them.
For this reason, many authors just create PDF documents with a print
driver to convert their texts, images, fonts, and designs into a
precomputed layout where all glyphs are processed and styled. But for
the web with dynamic contents, this would not work, so instead we've
seen non interoperable solutions such as servers serving contents in
some non-standard systems (like Flash and Silverlight) where the
effective rendering is performed on the web server that just
distributes prerendered images in those applications. We still need
something for the more standard HTML/CSS, and for mails, IRC channels,
smartphones...
For now, I think that some solution can be thought about : why don't
font foundries transform their business of selling fonts that can be
used in an unlimited number of documents, into a service where an
author could request that their documents be prepared for use with a
choice of font designs ? For such use, the cost would not be paid at
the normal price of fonts, but could be much smaller and incremental,
paid for each document. Once some threashold has been reached, the
font would be offered for free to these authors. foundries would
collect enough money from many more clients, and could continue to
support more designs, more scripts, better hinting, and new formats,
and could also place some of their oldest basic fonts into some free
packages usable from any place by any user (even if those fonts retain
their copyright).
Let's not forget also that hinting is very complex and still needed
today because displays still have a too limited resolution (but we see
now the display resolution being increased significantly : 200 dpi
displays are not so uncommon today, and most printers will print at
200 dpi or more, where hinting is not so essential. In addition the
color depth and alpha rendering is also improving, along with the
capabilities of graphic processors, so that they can simulate 300 dpi
resolution for text. At 300 dpi, font hinting gives very little
improvement for the readability of documents at reasonnable sizes. So
why isn't there an initiative to work on simpler font formats that can
be designed by more people with less qualification ?
Let's suppose that all OSes come now with a basic (and simple to use)
TrueType font creator. Font foundries could now work for these font
authors that will request their help to improve their visual quality
(e.g. adding kerning information, completing the additional tables
needed for interoperability, converting these fonts to other formats,
adjusting the metrics for correct alignment, checking the completeness
for some classes of languages or scripts, creating font derivatives
such as bold and italic, and demonstrating it by a sample design
document where users could see how much the design was improved by the
professional foundries). There's lot of creativity on the world, but
still lack of expertise for working on existing font formats.
For now the commercial system used by foundries is still prehistoric
(selling only to a few large corporations or medias) and not developed
as a service as it should be now : they are just selling fonts that
can only be used in limited contexts but not on the web (because they
are not embeddable, not even in a limited way). And those foundries
should cooperate to resell their own designs between each others so
that creators could just buy usage rights from any one of them for a
large choice of designs. This makes the fonts expensive for everyone,
and gives little intereation and promotion of great document designs.
It's legitimate for foudries to get paid for great fonts they create,
but there's certainly better way to get more by extending their reach
of customers at smaller prices and through alternate payment systems.
There's also a lack of protocol standard for web browsers : when they
restrict a CSS stylesheet by allowing a web font to be downloaded only
from the same domain as the HTML document, it is limiting the sales
and interoperability : my opinion is that web fonts should be hosted
by foundries directly and referenced by web sites in theor own
stylesheets. Web browsers shouls still be able to accept that web
fonts come from a trustable source ; the browser would request the web
font by first getting an authorization key from the document's source
domain, then would use that key to download the font/glyphs from the
foundry server that would check the credential presented and exposing
the authorized document source.
There are certainly lots of innovation to find there and to implement.
For now all font formats are not portable and there's a severe lack of
interoperability, usability and cooperation, in the way they are
created and distributed today.
2011/1/6 Krishna Birth <krishnabirth@gmail.com>:
> For example, I am on a member participation website and I cannot use my
> desired fonts on my computer as they are "non-transferable' / they cannot be
> transferred easily and spontaneously. Suppose if a website has my desired
> fonts to use via @font-face, I cannot use them 'real time' as it is one
> direction e.g. I want to be able to use the font as I type. Thus there are
> these barriers and monopoly. Something should have been done about this
> years ago. Webmail should have it also. I should be able to upload my
> desired fonts and type on the member participation websites. This feature is
> important to have on text editors / text fields and should be implemented
> immediately. Once this feature is used then if particular websites have a
> policy about what fonts users can upload, they could state it.
>
>
> -----
>
> Best,
>
>
> Meeकu
>
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