6 ms·
Fuck the foundries
- tptacek 18y agoOpen source fonts won't be crappy for long once they're easily usable by everyone's browser.
- briansmith 18y agoThat's basically the same as the "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" argument. I won't hold my breath. Open source end-user products always seem to improve at a snails pace.
- frankus 18y agoThere are enough differences that I don't think your analogy holds water. One could just as well use the analogy of linking to Wikipedia as a citation rather than some proprietary site behind a paywall. The former has clearly won in the general case.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- madair 18y agoThe difference is that it takes one good typographer to create a font. It takes a whole high school to keep Gnome screwed up.
- IsaacSchlueter 18y agoWell, go check out the fonts. Some of them are nice. I'll use them. People do actually upgrade their browsers these days. The browsers yell at them if they don't. The next versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE all support it. It's only a year or so off (probably less if you don't wait for IE6/7 to go away.)
- Silhouette 18y agoI'm not sure you understand the sheer scale of the task that is creating a good font set. Professionals often spend years going from an idea to a full font family with a good glyph complement, and it's not getting any easier now that internationalised character sets and OpenType wizardry are the norm rather than a bonus.
- tptacek 18y agoI'm not underestimating the amount of effort it takes to create a good typeface. I'm saying that the market value of making one of your faces free/embeddable is likely to be high enough that at least a few indies (not "open source" font dorks, but people like David Březina, who don't have a permanent home at FF or HFJ or Adobe) will release their work --- because why not?
- misuba 18y agoPaging Mark Shuttleworth; Mark Shuttleworth, please pick up the white courtesy phone. Lots of people care about the open web, like type, and have money to throw at the problem. Well, okay, not lots, but enough.
- JulianMorrison 18y agoNo, lets be realistic. They will be crappy, they will be everywhere, they will define people's expectations of "what a font is". It's like Ikea versus hand-carved artisan furniture, the real stuff just doesn't compare, but nobody you're likely to meet could afford it, and the bolt-together ticky-tacky does the job (or fails, but people are so used to the fail they work around it).
- danbmil99 18y agodudes, get real. I can read the web just fine. Who cares about this? There isn't even enough resolution on my screen to tell the difference between a good font and a great one. This reminds me of when drummers got all weepy because of drum machines. When your scene is done, it's time to gracefully exit the stage.
- Silhouette 18y agoThere isn't even enough resolution on my screen to tell the difference between a good font and a great one. A decade ago, when 1024x768 on a 17" monitor was doing OK and high quality icons were 32x32 in 256 colours, they might have said the same thing. Today, screens with twice that pixel count aren't unusual, and everyone from operating systems to web sites is using much more detailed icons. By the same token, low resolution screens are one of the places where the difference between a good font and a great font really stands out. It's not the same difference you'd see on paper out of a 2400dpi printer. In fact, the qualities that make a font good for screen use are quite different to those that make a font good for print use. But to maximise the visual appeal and, more importantly, the legibility and readability of text on screen in a world where on-screen reading is increasingly taking over from other media, we need people who understand how to achieve the best results with what precious screen real estate we have. Alas, as with most things in graphic design and typography, good work is rarely noticed because it's good work, while bad work is rarely noticed because people don't know the difference (but still read slower, make more mistakes, and get tired sooner).
- JulianMorrison 18y ago
- harpastum 18y agoI hadn't heard of the Open Font Library[1] before. It looks extremely interesting, especially using dynamic font linking with @font-face[2]. [1]http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/ http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/ [2]http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_@font-face?ccm=/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_@font-face http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_@font-...
- GHFigs 18y agoTheir purpose is undermined by the fact that they don't even use @font-face on their own site. The could have and should have, given that the first specified face in the stylesheet is "Nimbus Sans", a free font. What I actually see on visiting Open Font Library is the headline "Typefaces we can all share" in Helvetica Neue, a typeface that in fact we cannot all share.
- diN0bot 18y agothe cursive font on diveintomark is virtually unreadable to me without magnifying it a whole bunch. :( edit: not cursive. narrow letter spacing. bold, too? gah my eyes.
- tptacek 18y agoThat's Gill Sans, one of the all-time greatest italic sans faces. See? He's right. The foundries are doomed. =)
- briansmith 18y agoIt might be great in print but it is horrible on-screen. Generally italic faces should be avoided on the web whenever possible. Failing that, it is much better to use one that was designed specifically for on-screen use, like one of the Microsoft C* fonts.
- mr_justin 18y agoIt's just italic. Not bold, not cursive, not "narrow letter spacing". Just plain ol' italic, or oblique for the pedantic.
- tptacek 18y agoGill Sans italic isn't an oblique. It's a genuine italic. Look at the 'a'.
- mr_justin 18y agoI was just looking at the CSS, which specifies oblique as opposed to italic.
- tptacek 18y agoThe CSS may ask for an oblique, but on my Mac, which ships with Gill Sans, I get an italic. Just to be pendantic. Obliques are slanted faces; italics are slanted faces with cursive letterforms.
- there 18y agothe permission table he is talking about sounds like the copy-prevention bit in PDFs. it's up to the reader software to enforce it, and since PDF is mostly an "open" specification, many free readers simply ignore it or allow the user to override it. but how are fonts any different than stock images? a designer/photographer creates a work, then licenses it to end users that are entitled to use it. if you have a license to a stock image, you can use it on your website. i can copy it and use it on my site, but that would be illegal. how is this different than fonts? if you have a license to use a font, use it. i can copy it and use it on my site, but that would be illegal. sites using stock images illegally are often sued or fined and there are a number of companies that offer services to find these illegally used images, even ones that have been resized or altered. with fonts it seems like it would be even easier to automate the process of crawling websites looking for a particular font file and checking the licensing of it, especially since the font files wouldn't be altered.
- chancho 18y agoYou can take the font from a web page, use it in Illustrator for printed material (still the bread and butter of foundries), stretch it just a bit so that its no longer in exactly the same proportions, and it becomes very hard to prove where the font came from. I suspect the fear is not so much fonts being used on webpages, but fonts getting "out there" in general. I agree, though: probably an unfounded fear.
- tptacek 18y agoFirst, how do you take a bitmap from a web page, pull it into a vector program, and resize it without redrawing the entire font? Second, I think you'd be surprised by how good trained designers are at spotting typefaces. "Stretch out" Helvetica a bit, and a trained eye is going to know you just mutilated Helvetica.
- eli 18y agoNo, the whole thing we're talking about here is embedding the font files in the webpage so that we can finally use whatever font we want as a typeface.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- huhtenberg 18y agoI frequent typophile.com, which is the online community of font designers, and the topic of online font distribution and "alternative licensing" surfaces every single month. My takeaway from these conversations that the designers are (a) technically clueless (b) conservative (c) and, pardon my French, scared sh*tless of losing control over their fonts. Latter is especially ironic, because they have no control to begin with. So the general sentiments are exactly what is described in that quoted interview - they expect someone to develop a magic bit and a DRM to enforce it and then suddenly things will get much better. Also just to illustrate the level of conservatism - someone who decides to offer 1 font from a family of 10 for free is viewed as a revolutionary dude with the balls of steel. Everyone enthusiastically cheers for him, but noone follows. In the end, it is really sad to see them burying their heads in the sand next to the music industry.
- marcusbooster 18y agoThis is absurd. I also frequent typophile and these are not the sentiments or the characteristics I've seen. Technically clueless? The entire disciple is technical by nature. People use and create their own tools as a matter of course, Python being the more popular language because of the RoboFab library. No one has a problem with "losing control" of the work they created, they just want to be compensated for it like a reasonable human being.
- huhtenberg 18y ago> Technically clueless? The entire disciple is technical by nature. People use and create there own tools.. Sure, there are some people who do that, but they are hardly a majority. But that's beside the point. Most importantly - they are conservative as hell and unwilling to experiment with licensing. Here's a very interesting thread on the subject, and do tell me you are not getting the vibe I am describing: http://typophile.com/node/54558 http://typophile.com/node/54558
- thwarted 18y agoNo one has a problem with "losing control" of the work they created, they just want to be compensated for it like a reasonable human being. This would seem to be contradicting itself. If you accept that control will be lost, then how can you accept that you'll be able to control that people will compensate you? And I'd venture to say that if you're unable to recognize that piracy is a social problem that does not have a technical solution, then you may qualify for being technically clueless in the context huhtenberg is talking about. There needs to be "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem Response" document for DRM implementation attempts.
- lsb 18y agoPersonally, I think it'd be awesome to have something like Yahoo Pipes, but for MetaFont.
- marcusbooster 18y ago1. Typefaces take a long time to develop - design, create, package. The process can take years. 2. Typefaces have a value. If they didn't people would be content just using Arial. 3. People that do this work should be compensated. 4. Trying to figure out a solution to this problem, both from a customers and creators view is more beneficial than the "fuck this, fuck that" rhetoric in the blog post.
- mr_justin 18y agoSure, but there has been this stalemate between font foundries and web designers for well over 10 years. I think this whole @font-face (1) thing is exactly what is needed to shake some sense into the foundries. Designers will start using the fonts they love, without needing to create a graphic, then the foundries will start freaking out and (hopefully) innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font. As a slightly different argument, using a font via @font-face is no different than using a graphic. Graphics can have usage permissions associated with them just like a font, so why do we need to invent a new means of distributing licensed fonts?
- jerf 18y ago"innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font." Innovation can only do what is possible. If the font foundries want it to be physically impossible to "steal" the font, there is simply no way to square that with making the font available over the web for the purpose of rendering it, without sacrificing too much usability to make it worth doing. Maybe IE can do it (although even then only dangerously, if you want it to be really secure), but there's no way to make it possible for Firefox, KHTML, and other open source browsers to use the font, but impossible to download it. They're just too open for that. And any solution based on leaving them out in the cold is rapidly becoming infeasible as IE may still have market share, but is very nearly the last closed-source browser of any significant still standing. Leave the handwaving of "innovative" solutions to impossible problems to the government.
- 18y ago
- AndrewO 18y agoI recently gained the same sentiment for different reasons. I decided to do (what I thought was) the right thing and buy a font directly from ITC. I chose the Mac option, being that I'm on a Mac. Much to my surprise, the download arrives compressed as a Stuffit Expander file. SERIOUSLY? Looking at the FAQ they say they Stuffit Expander is the default compression format for Macs and is distributed with every Mac browser. When was the last time they bothered to check that? I can barely remember the last time I had Stuffit installed on my Mac and I've worked closely with 6 machines since 1999 (I seem to remember having it with 10.2 around 2003, but that may be wrong). So, yes, fuck 'em. When Mark said, "They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around", it rang true for me.
- briansmith 18y agoThis is at least partially a reaction to the Linux community's tricks to get fonts. Some people in the Linux community wrote a program to automatically download and install Microsoft's TrueType Font Collection fonts after installation. That way, Linux can use all the fonts that Microsoft spent millions of dollars designing, Linux itself isn't affected by the fonts' license, nobody in the Linux community has to spend resources to design decent fonts, and the user isn't hassled much. All the font foundries saw that and said "we will never allow that to happen again"--especially since the intersection between their customers and Linux users is nearly the empty set. Their proposed solution is to allow embedding only if the font files on the servers are covered by the DMCA. That is why there is a trivial obsfucation of the font information in the EOT specification. If somebody distributes a program to scrape a bunch of fonts of the web and install them onto a person's computer, they can use the DMCA to take the program down (just as the movie industry did with DeCSS). It isn't 100% effective, but it does help prevent casual piracy. The copy-protection bits of EOT are a lost cause in the long run. But, they will be somewhat effective in the short run. That is just like DeCSS--the first couple of years, it was difficult for an inexperienced user to find a trustworthy DeCSS program with a usable interface. I support EOT because Microsoft already made it the de-facto standard in 1997, and Microsoft already said they won't implement TTF linking in IE. That means that if other browsers don't implement EOT, we will always have the hassle of having separate font files for IE and other browsers. That is silly. It is the other browsers' fault that they have been so lethargic to implement font linking. Now, 12 years later they finally implement it, but in an incompatible way. Then they turn around and blame Microsoft for having a 12-year-old implementation that is incompatible with their nubile mechanism. Who wins at that game? Only people who value smugness over productivity.
- jbert 18y ago> This is at least partially a reaction to the Linux community's tricks to get fonts. Some people in the Linux community wrote a program to automatically download and install Microsoft's TrueType Font Collection fonts after installation. This is true, but perhaps misleading since it misses an important point. The font downloader is legal according to the licensing terms: http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web#cite_note-1 http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web#c... Even if there were super-effective bits embedded in the font which magically enforced the licensing terms it would still have been allowed.
- TweedHeads 18y agoProfessional Fonts for 99cts coming soon! Only at the AppStore
- Silhouette 18y agoI realise that was meant to be a joke, but that's exactly the sort of dramatic shift in sales and marketing tactics that might keep the major foundries relevant. Look at how many people have their own blog, or MySpace page, or otherwise have created a little world of their own design on the Web. Look at how successful iTunes and the like have been in selling music conveniently, reliably, and at a price that doesn't make someone who wants that music think twice and look for a free but illegal copy elsewhere. I don't think selling fonts very cheaply via these sorts of channels and/or partnering deals with the major social networking/blog services is such a crazy idea. Different, yes. Unknown, sure. But not crazy.
- misuba 18y agoMaybe someone should take a tip from the scientists and game developers behind Fold It!, the protein folding "game," and create a simple Flash web game that lets players hint and kern open fonts a letter at a time.
- danbmil99 18y agoI had no idea such an industry existed. I thought fonts were either handed down by God, or invented by Martha Stewart in her spare time. Does anyone really give a crap about this?
- tezza 18y agoMark ==== wow. What an overreaction from Mark Pilgrim[1]. While sound & fury may grab eyeballs, he is ignoring solutions already in front of his face[2]. The Solution ============== I worked with fonts and licensing all the time in a previous job, generating automated artwork. The big thing missing in Open Source [his 'usable'] fonts is kerning and hinting. There is nothing stopping someone setting up a Kern-or-Not? website where web people vote on which kerning values look best, and incorporating that data set into an OSS font foundry[3]. I already did some of this myself to kern HTML using spans with negative margins. To get excellent results you only need a few key characters [in English]. I used Web fonts, but made up the kerning offsets by trial and error. There is nothing stopping other people doing the same [see 2]. 'T', 'W' are the big offenders. You can get excellent results concentrating on these and all the vowels. T e , T o , T y , T i , T e, W * etc. This is not exhaustive. ------------------------- [1] I came across his emails all the time when I was working on the OSS Greasemonkey in the early days of its development. He threatened the lead dev with 'forking the project and working on it until the day I die' if the project did not take a direction he wanted. I believe it was another of one of the fequent LGPL/GPL arguments that whirlwind in many OSS projects. The mailing list greasemonkey-[user|dev] doesn't seem to include such old emails [c 2005], so no link, sorry. [2] Mark seems to prefer that other people fix the problems under his guidance. [3] May I suggest Public Domain for the dataset to avoid horrendous license choice debates?
- jacobolus 18y agoHe said he'd fork greasemonkey & maintain it if the official greasemonkey started informing websites of its presence(which would presumably allow them to target different content at greasemonkey users, or try to circumvent it, etc.). I hardly think that's an unreasonable position.
- tezza 18y agoI haven't been around other projects when someone threatened to fork it 'until the day I die', so I don't know how the tone comes across then. The context was general discussion of architectural / license issues. It seemed at the time like Mark went for the Nuclear [fork] option very, very early on in the discussion. I can only imagine what it felt like for the lead devs, but it cannot have been good. Unreasonable - borderline; rude, counterproductive - yes. This is all from my memory in 2005, without list logs to refresh.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]