Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts? 315
dotne writes "Microsoft has submitted Embedded OpenType (EOT) to W3C and a slimy campaign for EOT has been launched. EOT is a DRM layer on top of normal TrueType/Opentype files; EOT ties a font file to a certain web page or site and prevents reuse by other pages/sites. Microsoft's IE has supported EOT for years, but it has largely been ignored due to the clumsiness of having to regenerate font files when a page changes. Now that other browsers are moving to support normal TrueType and OpenType on the web (Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Prince), W3C is faced with a question: should they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"
Re:Loaded question (Score:1, Informative)
Use sIFR? Uses flash but has decent failover in the event the Flash doesn't show up/gets munged.
The 'DRM hole' (Score:3, Informative)
Any DRM system for 'public distribution' is destined for failure. Why? Because, ultimately, you have to give the end-user some way to decrypt the raw font/music/video/whatever. If the user can decrypt it, there is NOTHING that can technically stop them from extracting the unencrypted data (as long as someone, somewhere, can write an app which pretends to be the 'legitimate app', but in reality does something the 'legitimate app' does not, like offering to save the font data to a file for you).
Encryption works to protect data between 1 part and 1 other party, where those two parties agree to not share the data with anyone else. Trying to use encryption to protect 'mass-market' distribution is a logical impossibility. Either I can or cannot decrypt the data, and if I can, I've got it, and can potentially give it to others.
Re:Loaded question (Score:2, Informative)
"Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?" Gee, I wonder what /. will think...
It's interesting to note that the linked page [cnet.com] has absolutely nothing to do with EOT; rather, it refers to Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web.
Besides, this is quite old news - I certainly knew about it several months ago, and the submission website [w3.org] says it was submitted in March, over five months ago.
required reading (Score:3, Informative)
See the Wikipedia article and the W3C team comment on the submission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_OpenType [wikipedia.org]
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/01/Comment [w3.org]
Re:Linux users install MS fonts??? (Score:5, Informative)
I always found truetype fonts sucked period, and the adobe type1 fonts seemed to render better, especially when printed.
From a technical viewpoint, today, there is very little to distinguish the formats. TrueType only does quadratic Bezier curves where Type 1 does cubic, but it is trivial to interpolate cubic curves with quadratic ones, at a slight cost in code size.
When you buy fonts, the higher-quality fonts tend to be in the Type 1 format, but that is for historical reasons.
Re:Loaded question (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Informative)
You only need 3 fonts. A serif, a san-serif, and a fixed width. For English at least.
Re:Loaded question (Score:4, Informative)
You're doing it wrong. Both yogh [wikipedia.org] and wynn [wikipedia.org] have unicode code points. They work [fileformat.info] just fine [fileformat.info] here.
Beware of trademarks (Score:5, Informative)
Don't use the same name, they're usually Trademarked.
And if you copied 100% of the size hinting, they would claim you were copying the program portion.
But, in essence, yes.
Re:Loaded question (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that a lot of webpages break when you change the font, text boxes will overflow, menubars will no longer fit and all kind of misery will result. To bad that Firefox doesn't have a button to fix those issues, since overflowing textboxes really don't look like a thing that should ever happen, no matter how crappy a webpage might be.