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

[Vernon Adams]

On 7 Jun 2013, at 12:21, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:

> On 7 June 2013 13:45, Vernon Adams <vern at newtypography.co.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> to convert from my sources to a woff, is a clear 'modification', i would say.
> 
> The OFL FAQ and I both disagree with this; WOFF is simply compression,
> not modification, and it guarantees 100% that the data you put into
> the compression process will be the data you get out. EOT and WOFF2
> can rearrange the data so it won't checksum the same, but it will be
> the same for all practical purposes. The tools used to make
> WOFF/EOT/WOFF2 may however make it very convenient to modify the fonts
> (subsetting, etc) before compression is applied.
> 
>> The main reason i would say it is a major modification, is because my OFL fonts
>> have been designed and published to be used for web, print, whatever.
> 
> Compressing them won't change that.
> 
>> A woff is a totally useless format for quite a few end user situations.
> 
> ? :)

So you're saying i should see the woff conversion as similar to distributing a font as a  gzip or tar? and a user wouldnt expect to be able to use a gzipped font for all occasions (but they could for some), but it can be easilly enough decompressed for other uses?

I guess i could buy that rationale :)

> 
> Its trivial to decompress WOFF, and there are a handful of independent
> implementaitons.

Yes i will look for a good libre tool for that.

> 
>> Hence why i would like to see a web tool that easilly identifies a
>> woff font in a web page, extracts the font from the browser cache,
>> converts it to OTF or TTF and downloads it for any other use.
> 
> If you want to fund it, I can find a developer.

Yes maybe, and i have asked around a little already. It seems more than worthwhile.

-v