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It's that time again. Every few months, the battle over Web-based typography appears on the horizon, is fought through press releases and breathless announcements, then settles under the surface again. Like the other technology showdowns in our industry - VRML, Java, ActiveX - the waves of hype come at regular intervals.
But even with the seemingly endless discussion about Web fonts, it's time to pay attention. Both Netscape and Microsoft now have actual shipping implementations of embedded-font technologies that you can use right now. And with that comes a new level of confusion among Web designers. What fonts can you use on your pages? Are you violating your software licenses? Does the intellectual property of type designers mean anything at all anymore?
First, let's look at the current technologies. Netscape, partnering with Bitstream, has released Navigator 4.0 with TrueDoc. According to Bitstream's Colleen Cronin, when a designer uses a typeface on a Web page, a TrueDoc-enabled authoring tool "records all of the character shapes used in the creation end and stores the glyphs in a compacted data form called the Portable Font Resource that travels along with the document." When you receive this PFR with your page, Navigator renders it to the screen using something called a Character Shape Player.
And that's the key message Bitstream keeps repeating - you're not sending fonts, you're sending "shapes" that represent the characters in the form you want. In fact, they won't even refer to their technology as embedding, but instead use that term as a negative feature of their competitors' technology. "The character shapes never become a font because they cannot be embedded onto the recipient system and are available for viewing and printing only," said Cronin.
Microsoft, which has partnered with Adobe, offers a different solution. Touting their new, unified OpenType format, the two companies are pushing ahead on a separate path toward font embedding online. The new format attempts to merge features from both Microsoft's TrueType and Adobe's Type1 font formats, according to David Melchon of Microsoft's Typography Group. "It's the best of both worlds," he said. "OpenType offers the printing benefits of Type1, with the screen quality and hinting of TrueType."
These fonts, of course, can also be embedded, a feature developed long ago for document sharing in Microsoft's Word 6.0. An OpenType font file can be tagged by the type designer or foundry with one of four levels of embedding - no embedding, "print preview," which allows simple viewing on screen or paper, "editable," which allows the recipient to change the document containing the font, and "full installability," which adds the face to the system permanently. According to Microsoft, less than 5 percent of TrueType fonts completely disallow embedding. Type1 fonts, while easily convertible to OpenType format, don't include the embedding permissions.
So what does this mean to you, the cutting-edge designer eager to use high-quality typefaces online? Unfortunately, the responsibility around intellectual-property rights still falls on your shoulders.
Of course, you'll first have to decide which font technology you're going to use, since Netscape and Microsoft are offering completely incompatible implementations (anyone else sick of this yet?) - or do some fancy negotiation based on which browser a user has. Then, you'll need to determine whether you're actually allowed to embed your system's fonts in your Web pages.
Netscape and Bitstream, offering yet another branded technology known as DocLoc, assure that encoded "character shapes" cannot be reverse-engineered into a font, thereby solving the intellectual-property rights of the foundries. Still, rumors of clever hacks who have done just that are flying through Usenet newsgroups and Web-design mailing lists.
Microsoft and Adobe, conversely, have tried to shift the responsibility to the creators of the typefaces, stating that all fonts should carry their own permissions. Their Web Embedding Font Tool does provide a report when processing typefaces, listing which ones can and cannot be embedded. Of course, this doesn't apply to Type1 faces or TrueType faces not tagged with this information.
So what's the solution? Unfortunately, we're only in the experimental stage right now. If you want to start playing with embedded fonts, take a good look at the fonts you've purchased for your system. If they come from Bitstream, Adobe, or Microsoft, you can be assured that they are legal to embed. If they come from another foundry, contact them. Find out their policy. Press the issue.
Font licensing is a tricky issue - one that has been debated since type first went digital. It's not about to go away now.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
