Typography On the Web Gets Different 378
bstender writes "Most major browsers — including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera — recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and learn more. You'll see three new typefaces — Liza, Auto, and Dolly — used in the body text and headlines."
No doubt the licensing issues are just as complex as the font nerd potential.
font of knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been waiting for something like this for a while. When I first got into web stuff I was struck by the vast difference between web layout and print layout. Yes, I understand the point about pixel-perfect control being a shackle and how web is supposed to have the flexibility of displaying on different hardware, different browsers, anything from a PDA to a 24" graphic designer screen. I've been bitten by websites that were so strickly formatted that they were unusable outside of their expected use. That being said, I still wanted embeddable fonts. Nice to see we have them now.
Hold on a sec... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, I don't know much about CSS. I'm more the "local" person in our security team (as compared to the "remote" gurus sitting some good distance from me. Yes, go ahead, make your jokes). But ... something that downloads something from the internet and pushes it through a browser without asking anyone human first looks a wee bit problematic for me.
Could anyone gimme a hint before I get off my rear and haul the same over those maybe even 30 feet to our remote gurus, so I won't look stupid when I suggest that problem to them?
Re:licensing issues for fonts (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep.
We had to switch from Linotype's Zapfino Extra to Adobe's Caflisch Script in a custom story book project 'cause Linotype wanted _thousands_ of dollars per _year_ to license the (already purchased) font for on-line PDF Previewing usage.
There are of course opensource / creative commons fonts, those can be used, but if everyone is using them, that kind of defeats the whole point of changing the typeface. Also, I haven't seen an opensource typeface that has the kind of hinting effort Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial &c. have (TNR in particular has man _years_ worth of effort in it) --- unfortunately we haven't gotten to the screen density which would allow us to dispense w/ hinting.
William
Re:licensing issues for fonts (Score:2, Interesting)
What licensing issues?
That some people want to be paid for their work is not an issue. That people can use unlicensed fonts isn't really any different than today (I suppose font designers might be a bit less happy with a solution that is promiscuous with their precious data).
An easy workaround would be for someone like the Mozilla foundation to spend a few million dollars making sure that a decent variety of fonts were available under liberal licenses. They may not feel like it, but they could certainly afford it, and if a few million dollars isn't enough to generate a couple of dozen decent fonts, I would be pretty surprised. Amusingly, Microsoft felt the need to do something like this a decade ago, and they actually did it.
Yes, but we need semantic fonts (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, we do need more fonts, but we need semantic ones. This is the entirely wrong way to go about it.
As anyone who's looked at their (good) browser's settings knows, the web supports standard "semantic" or functional font specifications, like sans, sans-serif, and cursive. You can assign these to things like Arial, Times, and Isabella or whatever cursive font you want.
The web page in the example really has no place specifying the exact font which should be used, as people with visual impairments, people with low-res portable devices, or people whose native language isn't based on a latin script, might have extreme difficulty reading it. However, if you specify that the title is to be in a cursive font, then browsers could simply ship with nice cursive font settings by default. This would allow pages to look good in the device in question, but also be fully configurable --- including for those art-nuts who care to pay to have the very best of fonts and displays.
However, the idea has not been taken far enough. Besides sans, sans-serif, and cursive, we could use lots of extra "semantic" font names like fantasy, futuristic, etc.
typekit (Score:3, Interesting)
So what's the deal with "typekit"?
Their blog [typekit.com] grandly announces (or at least strongly implies) that they've solved the licensing/theft/etc problems with downloadable fonts, without using DRM, but while there's a lot of handwaving, they don't actually seem to go into any detail about how they've "solved" it.
Does anybody know?
Re:Oh Lord! (Score:2, Interesting)
Now not only will we have to worry about horrible colors and sizes but styles as well.
Not that this is a bad feature to have, but it will probably cause more bad then good.
Re:Oh Lord! (Score:5, Interesting)
the only option I can find that would resemble what you're saying disables ALL font rendering other than the fonts you've chosen above (IE, ones you already have on your system). I tested it with a custom page, using Georgia, and it displayed it as Arial. When I reenabled the box it rendered properly.
AFAIK there is no option to stop fonts from being downloaded, and unchecking this option may not stop them being downloaded at all
Re:The new BLINK (Score:5, Interesting)
You change one css[sic] rule and all the logical kinds of content it applies to all change. [sic]this facilitiates[sic] accessibility and comprehension of a documents[sic] logical layout by the reader. [sic]presumably the latter desiderata is the real goal, not pretty looking documents. [sic]given that, there is a large benefit to users if web pages look a lot alike. it puts less burden on the end user to decipher the page and access it's[sic] content if qualtiatively[sic] different authors web pages dont[sic] differ from each other in too many ways.
CSS is meant to ensure that styles within a site are consistent and logical (though it still has many shortcomings in that regard), not to make sites across the web somehow conform to the same set of styles.
Designers use CSS to define the look of their page, and set the font, which affects (sometimes dramatically), the reader's perception and comprehension of the written content. If you view the look of the page as somehow completely separated from the style in which it is presented, you are falling into an old trap which holds that content is not at all affected by the form in which it is presented, that the medium does not affect the message. And if you think the only reason for changing fonts is 'pretty looking documents', you've misunderstood the function of typography.
You don't have to be a font nerd to decry the appalling typography that passes for acceptable on the web (which you are claiming is some sort of standard we should all adhere to), the lack of subtlety in the default fonts chosen and typography available, and the general philistinism which holds that online typography has nothing to learn from older uses of type and CSS 2.1 is good enough for everyone.
PS For someone who's so hot on accessibility and comprehension, you don't seem very keen on using the cues provided by the English language to improve comprehension (i.e. punctuation and capital letters).
quality is quality, however... (Score:5, Interesting)
I should know - I used to do it for a living. However, they are easily stolen, and fonts that once cost serious bucks are now (essentially) free. Which is why I don't do it for a living anymore. But I'm not discussing that - what I am pointing at is if you can embed fonts in a page, it is a trivial exercise to open a font, "clean" the points (creating a new drawing of the font), and then export the thing with a new name. So, you could take Arial, fry it up, and come out with Ariel. Now someone might notice something fishy about Ariel, noting it similarity to Arial. In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright. Only the software that is the font file itself. This is what torpedoed the type industry back in the mid 1990s, in Adobe vs SSI (?) case in Florida.
Sure, SSI got sued by Adobe for this, but that was pre-www - back in the day of centralised font distribution systems on floppies or CDs. MS or Adobe would have to chase down thousands of people with take-down notices. The FROEI (financial return on energy invested) would be microscopic and an endless battle due to variations in international laws.
Another strategy would be DRM. This would work on new DRM fonts, but there are literally tens of thousands of older fonts (from ancient PostScript to TrueType to newer OpenType) that are not DRM'd and they would be all over the place, effectively smothering any DRM font system.
Flash was developed initially as an animation system, but quickly it became obvious that it opened up font use, even if the test is not animated. Flash has its own and deeply obvious problems, and I look forward to its death. That said, at the time it served a useful purpose. With AJAX and now font-face, I don't see much future for Flash at all, outside of its original use as an animation engine.
I'm of mixed feelings on this - as I noted, a good font is hard to make. However, the basic digital fonts were developed way back in the 1980s and early 1990s and have only been updated for new technology (unicode, opentype, etc.) and one would think that there is little point to grinding more and more out of them, except in terms of petty greed. If Adobe had their way, we never would have seen TrueType and you would have to pay $100 for every typeface and each would have to be installed on only your machine. Of course, it would look very good. If MS had their way, everything would be TrueType and you could only use the fonts that come installed with the OS, and any extra would be excluded at the OS level... and they would all suck. So, the piracy of the 1990s (fueled by the ancient Titan and venerable program, Fontographer) led to an explosion of fonts. Most of them craptastic, but a true example of digital creativity. Some/Many were obvious rip-offs, but their hinting was often crap - delta hints were almost always missing, their letterspacing worse, and the kerning either atrocious or non-existent.
Tools, including Fontographer (resurrected by FontLab, bless their hearts) have improved since 1993, and so have "amateur" fonts. However, the market for fonts is still very poor as the saturation level increases daily.
Net result? If MS adopts @font-face for IE, game over (in a good way), and we will see a flowering of online type design. If MS drags its heels on this, @font-face could die on the vine, and we'll be stuck with Arial, for a VERY long time.
So, here's hoping @font-face spreads like crazy, and we can finally get some decent looking pages going...
RS
Re:Self-downloading fonts... (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably a while. But it will probably happen. Broken font rendering implementations are widespread - you can completely hose MacOS if you load a font with bogus data in it. Chances are there's a way to turn that into an exploit, but nobody's bothered in the past because there's no easy way to stuff a font down the computer's throat over the internet.
Re:font of knowledge (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, ultimately it is about the content, but that doesn't mean presentation isn't important. If you were to take the same document, but render it in Word and LaTeX you would probably see a huge difference. The LaTeX version just looks better and is easier on the eyes. If it weren't important, we would still be using fixed width fonts and 80 character wide pages -- the content is the same.
Re:licensing issues for fonts (Score:4, Interesting)
There're scarcely more than 5 or 6 opensource / creative commons fonts which are:
- suitable for use as body copy
- not clones / knockoffs of extant fonts
- available in formats compatible w/ the technology in the original article
- and which people would actually be interested in using
As much as I like it, I doubt anyone will want to use Latin Modern (the OpenType version of Computer Modern). Others lack an italic, &c.
Actually all this begs the question of what typographic controls are available? Can one access things like contextual ligatures and the ssalt## (stylistic alternates 1--20) tags?
William
Arbitrary Libraries from Untrusted Sources? (Score:2, Interesting)
Loaded into rendering code? I hope this is well-sandboxed! I see nothing about the context in which these are loaded.
I fear this could be a way to load more nasties on yer little incubator.
Re:typekit (Score:1, Interesting)
As I understand it (I could be very wrong here), they're a security gate between the browser and the holder of the font copyright. The font holder allows TypeKit to host their font. Typekit allows you to specify that font via JavaScript and (presumably) checks to ensure that the client is passing a valid key of some sort to them before allowing that font to be displayed. Not an ideal solution (OK so now instead of converting type to images or flash we're requiring JavaScript?), but one that makes the copyright holders a bit more comfortable. I, for one, would rather just use free, open fonts via @font-face, but I know some professional designers out there are often required to use particular non-free fonts.
If you ask me, it's still Digital Rights Management. I'm not sure how the definition of that term got so skewed that it suddenly only applies to rootkits being installed or something. Seems to me that anything that manages digital files that are protected by copyright ought to be classified as DRM.
Re:Demo site fails in Opera and IE (Score:3, Interesting)
It worked fine for me in Opera 10. In fact, the page showed about six or seven different fonts in Opera 10, versus only about four in Firefox.
Here is a screenshot I took comparing how it looked in Opera 10 versus FF 3.5:
Screenshot [googlepages.com]
I don't get it. Both the summary and the line at the top of the page say that the page is optimized for Firefox 3.5, so why the hell does Opera show *more* fonts? Is it failing somehow in FF or is Opera somehow going above and beyond what the page designer intended? :)
Re:Demo site fails in Opera and IE (Score:3, Interesting)