101 Untitled

SIFR is indeed a good way of using your favourite fonts on a web page. However, I feel that it is only a stop gap until the real problem of using fonts online is rectified. Have you ever tried copy and pasting a mixture of normal and sifr text from a page? As far as I can tell, it can’t be done.

I think there is high probability that opening up web fonts will be abused, but that’s why people like us have a job, to ensure that it doesn’t. Personally I can’t wait for a proper solution to this problem.

posted at 01:40 pm on January 15, 2008 by Chris Rowe

102 Why @media?

Your suggestion to change letter spacing in @media rules is interesting, and not a feature I would oppose, but I feel it falls short of solving certain problems.

For example, if the user has the desired font but their browser doesn’t support fonts downloading, they won’t receive the rendering even though they potentially could. Why not integrate all font properties into @font-face, such that each font-family can be given suitable modifications? This idea came to me years ago when I stumbled upon a (now non-existent) page detailing the horrors of spacing and other rules designed for Verdana when viewed on Linux systems without the font. The details should be tied to the font itself, and only separable from it at the designers discretion.

This framework could also be extended to point to different files for italics and various weights if necessary, again each featuring their own font declarations.

However far we might go in this direction, it believe that @font-face is the more logical location for this kind of information.

posted at 02:54 am on February 3, 2008 by William Wedin

103 What if …

… the occasional Mozilla Firefox/IE/Safari/Opera updates also installed a few decent free fonts like Gentium? It wouldn’t be a final solution though.

posted at 12:42 am on February 10, 2008 by Frode Frank

104 Intellectual Property

The name of a font is certainly not copyrightable. On the other hand the font name may be trademarked. However, the font itself is almost certainly protected by copyright as it is a series of instructions of how to create each particular glyph.

Whenever I discover people saying or writing amazingly wrong things about intellectual property rights I am reminded of a friend of mine who believes that all of the chinese restaurants in the anglosphere could have their menus in written in correct English for the cost of an eggroll if they would run it by a fourth grader before sending it to the printer. There really is no good reason for such wrong-headedness regarding intellectual property issues in a world with Wikipedia.

posted at 09:45 am on March 19, 2008 by Tom Davis

105 The Future of Typography

For those that haven’t noticed yet, Apple just released Safari 3.1 with support for @font-face embedding. This whole issue makes me think of the open letter to Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft on Design by Fire a few years ago . And really it makes me think about the future of typography, especially that which is released in the public domain. I even wonder how personal typography might become, if it might become more practical for individuals to create typefaces based on their handwriting or unique style. With OCR technology and tactile interfaces, it might become possible to handwrite text on a tablet interface, have the computer convert that to digital characters, but then render them using the “typeface” it has learned from you.

posted at 12:02 am on March 21, 2008 by Philip Ashlock

106 Stop complaining about foundry copyrights

Copyright is completely irrelevant to this discussion. If you can use Zapfino in Photoshop to create an image for the Web brower, you can write “Zapfino” into CSS to create some text for the Web browser.

When a type foundry sells a font to a computer user, that is for the user to use in their own publications and designs when they are authoring documents, it has nothing to do with reading documents. For example, I can pick up today’s New York Times and if it is printed in a typeface that I haven’t purchased and don’t have the right to use in my documents that is just fine … I’m reading the NY Times, not writing or publishing it. If a user’s Web browser downloads a font to show them someone else’s publication or design, that is reading, not authoring, and there has never, ever, in human history, been a precendent for the reader licensing fonts before they can read a document.

When the Web first went mainstream, there was a bugaboo about the fact that technically, a person’s computer was making a copy of the content of a website in order for them to read it. Downloading a font that will be used to render the current Web page is the same thing.

posted at 07:58 pm on February 19, 2009 by Fred Hamranhansenhansen

107 It's not about copyrights, it's about software lic

@Fred: copyright on fonts is sketchy at best anyway. The US courts in particular have consistently struck down any claim of copyright in a typeface, as they consider type to be a functional work, but not sufficiently novel to patent either. In effect, they’re saying that all typefaces are derivative works of the original Greek alphabet and hence not deserving of copyright protection.

For this reason foundries don’t actually claim copyright in the typefaces themselves. Instead they claim copyright on the .ttf file (or whatever) as a piece of software. Then, when you buy the right to use the software, they make you click “Agree” to an EULA which prohibits you from uploading the file to your website. If you want your users to see your font over the web, then you need to send them that file, and the EULA says you can’t.

Australian copyright law doesn’t mention typefaces at all, and the FAQs from our copyright office advise us to treat it as software. I think that characterising a bunch of declarative code that executes nothing and merely describes the shape of a non-copyrightable typeface as software is a stretch, but there you go. In practice, it’s simpler to avoid getting shouted at by the old foundries and work with the new ones on more equitable terms.

posted at 01:56 am on April 3, 2009 by Viveka Weiley

108 OpenType Feature Support in Opera

I develop my own fonts, and would be more inclined to add OpenType features if there was more support for them from applications like Opera and OpenOffice.

I would like to see support for OpenType Features in Opera. Firefox 3 already supports ligatures by using code like this:
[div class=“codeblock”]
<p style=“text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-family: Palatino Linotype; font-size: 60px;”> 

[/div]

OpenType is also useful for Small Capitals, OldStyle Figures, Stacking Fractions, and Super/subscripts.

posted at 04:44 pm on April 11, 2009 by Bhikkhu Pesala

109 Firefox 3.5 introduces font-face support, time for

While I was reading up on browser’s fonts resolution algorithms (not really finding much to read) wanting to improve my story on font resolution and glyph substitution in browsers I came across this post which proved an excellent read on the side of “what can be done if…”.

10th anniversary is gone, enter the 12th anniversary: Safari and Firefox 3.5 now support font embedding through type-face. It isn’t perfect (glitching), but it’s a start. Perhaps a good time for an update? The “if”-part of the story has become reality, it seems :)

What I missed or overlooked in your story: CSS 2 allows the browser to automatically locate an online source for a font (based on the font-family). However, so far I haven’t seen any browser doing that. Obviously, when it comes to legal issues, this requires the font to be freely available or part of the browser’s legacy.

— Abel —

posted at 05:31 pm on September 29, 2009 by UnderMyHat

110 Need Help w/@font-face

I’m very new to web design. Still attending CC for my certificate. I have an html doc that dreamweaver was used to create & has some inline css for the fonts chosen. Font in a red suit for 1st choice in size 36 no headings, 2nd choice is papyrus bold no headings for the title. I have a small amount of text that I only want to be in papyrus bold. I can’t seem to figure out where to place the @font-face code etc. or what exactly it should be, even after reading & re-reading every single piece of info on the web. I think I might need someone if at all possible to look at my code. I used the drag & drop features of dreamweaver to create it, because I am just not good enough at writing the html yet. I can’t use external style sheets because this is for en ebay template. eBays system is copy & paste for html. So once again my css is inline. I’ve tried dropping the font files into the font generator from fontsquirrel , but just keep getting an error with a red X in a box. Some of my text was done in photoshop because that text wont ever change so I made it part of the images. But some text will need to change on a reqular basis, & also needs to be searchable through tags in eBays system so it can’t be an image. How can I find out what the exact code should be & where to place it in the html doc? Thank you for any assistance! Stacey

posted at 02:34 am on January 5, 2010 by Stacey.S

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