81 To answer my own question

http://www.lalit.org/lab/fontdetect.php

posted at 01:45 am on September 8, 2007 by Kenneth McCall

82 Typeface vs Font

I liked the article very much, but there is one thing I’d like to correct.

• A typeface is the actual design & spacing of a family of characters.

• A font is mechanism for recreating a typeface — This can be a digital file, molded letters, stencils etc.

People who design Type are called Type designers. A completed family of characters they create is called a typeface . To recreate their typefaces, other designers use fonts.

So it is accurate to say:
In the future, designers will have the option to use more typefaces by allowing web browsers to download fonts used in their websites.

posted at 11:24 am on September 10, 2007 by Kris Meister

83 Copyright Issues

With regard to the font-face and name copyright issue, those of us who have designed fonts which are available freely should have an option to make them available in a webfont format. I think it appears to be quite the cop-out by the browser makers that this would be an issue. Take for example another product, freely available (like most modern browsers), OpenOffice suite. There is very little that can be done by M$ to thwart the use of said product, due to the fact that there is no profit except by those using the product. Let us apply this to the use of a font from some foundry, which the designer of some website uses, whether purchased or pirated. This is the designer’s responsibility, or in the case of someone rifling the font from his site, the end-user’s responsibility. Legal BS by companies only goes so far, and they should accept the fact that there is always some bit of piracy for the larger portion of good citizens. This should not stifle the improvement of the web experience by restricting the use of technologies over simple copyright, they only the provider of the translator, not the fonts themselves.

posted at 06:30 pm on September 10, 2007 by Kevin Fagan

84 Untitled

“”“
I am absolutely bummed by the amount of people who think this is a bad idea. I thought more designers read this zine/blog/site whatever you want to call it. The lack of foresight and fear of change by many of you is astounding. I’m truly disappointed in the so called “designer� community here.
“”“

You said it.

These arguments of “people will make ugly pages” are completely absurd. They already DO. It’s a good thing people with this mindset never prevailed or we’d all still be sitting around using gopher) and such.

Very very disappointing crowd here for the most part these days.

posted at 11:52 pm on September 13, 2007 by Jeff Blaine

85 Centralize it!

Rather than having fonts scattered all over the web at multiple URL’s which invites anyone to post and use a pirated font (and opens up security concerns), what we probably need is some sort of body to oversee the “web fonts” with a centralized font server.

I’d hate to add more bureaucracy to the mix, but I think this is a solution worth investigating.

That way all fonts are centralized, and can have some sort of authentication and review process. Font designers could submit their fonts for inclusion to the web fonts library, and a community could be built around the concept.

Recommendations could be made on minimum font sizes for the busier fonts (doesn’t mean people will heed them, but they will be warned)

This potentially would eliminate the need for the extra css code, as the css would first check on the local system, then check in with the font server. (seems like a minor update would take care of this on the browser side, too)

As I said, this adds a layer of bureaucracy, but perhaps the w3c or some other organization could extend itself to take care of this.

Of course, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, so some people wouldn’t like this setup, but it’s much better than what we currently have!

posted at 09:16 pm on September 18, 2007 by Andy Ford

86 Interesting stuff...

As a developer who often gets involved in design issues, I often find myself torn.

While having access to a multitude of fonts would be nice, being restricted in the way we currently are does focus things on clear and elegant design – which I think is a good thing.

You only have to look at MySpace profiles to see what could happen if the floodgates were ever opened…

posted at 12:30 pm on September 19, 2007 by Jonathan Beckett

87 New font format

Well not format – but something that would be encrypted that says “free for use” or not..

Of course that would be a DRM thing.. And that just makes things more complicated….

Of course it would all get hacked..

posted at 12:29 am on September 21, 2007 by Kenneth McCall

88 Yet again...

Why would we have a central font server system? That’s plain ignorant. The load would be such as to make it financially insane to build and maintain. Not to mention that the custom font option would be rendered useless to designers, simply due to the fact that including even one custom font that had to come from a central font server system would slow down the page load to a crawl worse than dial up. Simply put, there is NO WAY that ANY centralized font serving system, EVEN without doing any processing that would add protections for copyright owners or whatever, would EVER be able to handle the load, NO MATTER HOW BIG IT WAS SCALED, to serve even a fraction of the entire web. PERIOD. Never mind that no matter how many users download a font and store it on their computer, there are a ZILLION fonts and a central server system would never shrink its workload due to this fact alone. People will continue to create new fonts, more fonts will get added to the registry, more fonts will be used by designers, and no matter how many fonts a user installs, they will hit the font servers every time some designer specifies a new font. There is no way to wrap a business model around that that could even come close to covering the usage scenarios. Never mind the startup capital just to keep the system from crashing and burning the very second it comes online. Sorry, bad idea.

posted at 02:03 pm on September 21, 2007 by Ray McCord

89 Also...

The only way I can think of that would work and protect font creators would be to require licenses on the server for the font in question that could be verified by a standard scheme, like SSL certificates. Font downloads would not happen if the license “certificate” is expired or fraudulent. The license could be simply signed using public/private keys that could be validated by the browser with the font designer’s public key.

The only way I can think of to handle the demand in a secure way would be to use a decentralized registry of public keys for various font creators. The browser would cache the key data, so that verifying the next site’s authorized use of the font would be faster and not have to hit the registry system to look up the key.

The registry system itself would be split into many trusted registries hosted around the world, much as the way in which DNS works. The browser would simply need to be able to query a root registry system once that doled out a geographically local list of trusted registry IP’s and then the browser could use the registries on that list to verify the public keys and download the font from the website they are visiting.

I’ll grant, it’s not necessarily the most simple thing in the world, but it’s feasible and allows ample protections for both web designers/site owners and font creators.

Such a system wouldn’t necessarily be limited to managing fonts, either.

Though I think the whole DRM issue is moot, I figured I’d share what seems to me to be the obvious way to deal with it if the devil has his way. Maybe he’d do it this way instead of a much more evil and intrusive approach.

Cheers.

posted at 02:30 pm on September 21, 2007 by Ray McCord

90 Wicked Cool

Thanks for the in depth coverage. A colleage of mine passed a link my way about something like this a few weeks back. Cool to see it in action!

posted at 07:13 am on September 26, 2007 by Scott Walldren