Comments on: Adobe, Web fonts and EOT

By: Tom Gewecke

Tom Gewecke — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:52:31 +0000

One thing which I have disliked in the past about eot is how easy this made it for people to produce webpages in totally non-standard encodings (e.g. mapping Bengali to Latin) instead of employing Unicode. Any chance the open standard could have something in it to avoid encouraging that?[This is a problem with linking to regular desktop fonts on web servers as well; it’s not specific to EOT. As soon as the designer can control what font is used/referenced reliably, they can use a non-standard encoding. Not much to be done about that, but it’s a small price to pay, in my mind. It also means they can make reliable use of Unicode PUA characters for glyphs which have no “real” Unicode encoding. In fact, they have much the same advantages and limitations of folks working in print…. – T]

By: minombresbond

minombresbond — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:16:18 +0000

the images in webpages are linking with src=”path/to/img.file” resource in the html code, and users can save images easily with a ‘save image as’ menu, and get the .jpg, .gif or .png in their local directoriesthese images have a license usually mentioned on the same website, and the users must respect that licenceif the license is not specified in any side, ‘all rigths reserved’ by default according global agreements on intellectual propertyif things are so with images files,why the fonts files is diferent?why not src=”path/to/font.ttf” ??thanks!saludos![95% of the fonts out there – and >95% of the ones web designers want to use – are font software that is licensed from retail font vendors. Said font vendors don’t want to let folks just place the fonts unprotected on web servers, so their licenses won’t allow it. End of story there. Unlike images, the average web designer is not capable of making a useful font, and a useful text font takes weeks, months, or years. – T]

By: Woz

Woz — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:15:05 +0000

Okay, not *illigal* but you required the origional font to view the PDF correctly. (Correct me if I’m wrong).[You’re wrong, or confused, anyway. You’re describing a situation in which the font is not embedded in the first place. – T]That’s just not an option for my clients. By allowing designers to enclose font-info inside the PDF Adobe just made is much more practicle. Isn’t it the same thing we see happening now with webfonts? A technique to allow the font-owners to embed font-info?[Essentially, yes. The primary difference is that the font is not literally embedded, but linked. But the net effect is the same: seeing the document in the fonts used by the person who designed the document. – T]

By: Kevin N.

Kevin N. — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:48:10 +0000

This is a great post. I for one can’t wait until the various browsers implement font embedding in some form – and EOT in particular. This is the only practical option on anyone’s radar, and it’s been a long time coming. Kudos to the practically minded people at MS, Mozilla and Adobe for seeing this for what it is, an opportunity to finally move forward with embedded font technology on the web.Now we just need something more useful than WEFT – which the last time I tried doesn’t actually play nice with OpenType CFF fonts (.otf). The generated font’s don’t render properly in IE – something to do with clear type I think. Hopefully the open spec will help lead to a tool that actually works (a tiny hurdle to be sure).I can’t wait, thanks. 🙂

By: Woz

Woz — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:12:28 +0000

I can’t wait to use and see more fonts on the internet! Finally!(This sort of reminds me of font-embedding in PDF files. Had Adobe not won the lawsuit “Adobe vs ITC” it would have ben illegal to embed a font in a PDF.)[I’m excited about it too. On the side, I believe you’re thinking of “Agfa Monotype v Adobe,” and as far as I can tell, the opposite outcome would *not* have made it “illegal to embed a font in a PDF.” – T]

By: Mikko Rantalainen

Mikko Rantalainen — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:45:35 +0000

Why should font files deserve any special “protection” over HTML, CSS, JPEG or SVG? Do you support EOT style format for “protecting” other files but fonts, too?[These other formats are not system resources that you install at the OS level and get some intrinsic benefit out of, so the analogy is weak. But this is a practical question, not a moral one: Web authors want to use fonts, and the folks who own the rights to the fonts are largely unwilling to have them placed in their original form on a web server, so how do we reconcile these conflicting needs? It’s not a question of what “font files deserve” but of what needs to be done to enable web authors to use a vastly wider range of fonts, and folks reading web pages to see what the web authors intend. – T]

By: Ralf Herrmann

Ralf Herrmann — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:17:04 +0000

Thanks for the summary!About the URL binding:You’re saying, one can build an EOT font that works on every website and this font will work in every version of Internet Explorer with EOT support?[Yes, that’s my understanding, from talking to folks at Microsoft. – T]