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You 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 n

by chancho 18y ago

You 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 ago
First, 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 ago
  No, 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.
- chancho 18y ago
  http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ but we weren't talking about bitmaps. I have no doubt that a trained typographer can identify fonts at 100 paces in a hurricane, but if he sees his font in printed material, contacts the publisher and says "That's my font" and the publisher says "No it's not" what is his recourse? He'd have to get some kind of order to search the publisher, or otherwise demand that the publisher prove that its a different font. How do you convince a judge that two fonts are the same, without superimposing them? Does "Look at the serifs!" hold up? I'm not saying that its impossible to prove the origin of a font, just that it gets a lot harder once you leave the digital world.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Look upthread, and apparently this happens all the time with stock photos.
huhtenberg 18y ago
> stretch it just a bit You are clearly not a graphic designer. Altering typeface proportions is the biggest no-no and the first sign of an amateur design botch-job. Just an FYI :-)
- chancho 18y ago
  > You are clearly not a graphic designer Which immediately follows from the presumption that I'm stealing fonts from webpages.

by chancho 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago

First, 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 ago
No, 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.
chancho 18y ago
http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ but we weren't talking about bitmaps. I have no doubt that a trained typographer can identify fonts at 100 paces in a hurricane, but if he sees his font in printed material, contacts the publisher and says "That's my font" and the publisher says "No it's not" what is his recourse? He'd have to get some kind of order to search the publisher, or otherwise demand that the publisher prove that its a different font. How do you convince a judge that two fonts are the same, without superimposing them? Does "Look at the serifs!" hold up? I'm not saying that its impossible to prove the origin of a font, just that it gets a lot harder once you leave the digital world.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Look upthread, and apparently this happens all the time with stock photos.

huhtenberg 18y ago

> stretch it just a bit You are clearly not a graphic designer. Altering typeface proportions is the biggest no-no and the first sign of an amateur design botch-job. Just an FYI :-)

chancho 18y ago
> You are clearly not a graphic designer Which immediately follows from the presumption that I'm stealing fonts from webpages.