[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Treatment of the OFL in the wild

[Vernon Adams]

Well, apart from feeling i might be a bit crazy for seeing this situation in the way i see it :)  i do think it's worth thinking about aspects of it that are 'out there' (Victor's words), because chances are they may be the mundane of tomorrow.

IMO at the moment we are still seeing the 'distribution' of Libre fonts in similar modes to modes we are used to seeing proprietary fonts distributed by; canonical, centralised, and ultimately controlled from a 'top down' approach. The 'top' being the designer, or publisher, or foundry. Proprietary fonts have to go these routes for obvious reasons. Libre fonts do not have to at all, their free-ness makes them inherently viral objects, if you want them to be. I suspect that more viral approaches to distribution may emerge, because they are becoming possible and practical. For example, the situation of 'pulling' fonts out of the browser cache; that action is a legacy from the slightly fudgy situation where the type industry wanted the web market, but didn't want to give fonts away. As a designer of free fonts, i'm stuck with that fudge, despite the fact that the technology actually presents a much more direct way to distribute fonts to users. E.g. instead of users having to jump hurdles to get a fairly useless WOFF file of my fonts,  i would want that a user could a Free font used on any webpage and be able to 1-click to download that font (intact) and so be able to then use it for web, print, whatever. IMO that's how free fonts could be utilised and distributed. It's pretty much exactly what Nathan describes. Select text, right click… "save font as…"  :) Perhaps some browser developers would be interested in this?

The idea that was floated a few years back of a 'permissions table' for (proprietary) webfonts, has allways interested me. It's maybe a shame it was never adopted, as it's a neat idea for how a font can carry all the information it needs to denote it's 'freedom' (or lack of it). Another aspect that may effect webfonts is the 'web DRM'  standards that are on the table with the W3C. It would be interesting if font file formats developed to carry 'freedom' information in a DRM protected web.

-vernon



On 6 Jun 2013, at 11:01, Nathan Willis <nwillis at glyphography.com> wrote:

> 
> On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Vernon Adams <vern at newtypography.co.uk> wrote:
> Yep.
> 
> I'll use Coda served from Adobe's Edge webfonts service as my example, from
> https://edgewebfonts.adobe.com/fonts#/?nameFilter=coda&collection=coda
> 
> So from e.g. that page, i can obtain the Coda fonts by using the Developer tools of my web broswer. Not sure if this works for all browsers, but i'm using Chrome so it does…
> 
> The page's  Resources are exposed in the Developer tools and i can see the url of the Coda Regular font, it is;
> data:font/opentype;base64,<i've cut the sqillions of lines of base64 encodingt>
> 
> That link kicks Chrome into downloading a single file called 'download' to my local machine.
> I then add the file extension '.woff' to that file, to create 'download.woff'. It's a base64 encoded woff font file.
> 
> I can then use this font file, or… i guess i can use it?… can i share it? What should i call it? can i use it on my own server within a css @font-face rule?
> I would like to print with it too… but it's a WOFF file, so more practical if i convert it… can i convert it into an opentype (OTF) file format? and print with it? Can i share that OTF? What can i call it?
> 
> It sounds like what you're fundamentally interested in here is a browser feature; akin to the manner in which (most?) browsers offer a  "View Image" / "Copy Image Location" / "Save Image As" option in the right-click menu.  Obviously they don't *have* to do that; that's their choice.  And I can see how it would be extremely helpful if you visit a page and notice something interesting about the fonts -- particularly if you like one but think you might want to modify it.  That's a lot more steps than is required to save and edit an image file, and image files are subject to just as much creator copyright protection as fonts.
> 
> I'm not sure how much could be done in the font *file* itself to simplify that situation if the browser exposes no convenient options to the user, though.  You can already provide URLs to the user in metadata; it's just not accessible, right?
> 
> So I guess I'm asking whether the answer isn't to open feature requests in Firefox & Chromium?
> 
> Nate
> 
> 
> -- 
> nathan.p.willis
> nwillis at glyphography.com
> identi.ca/n8