On 27 Jun 2011, at 04:47, Marc Paré wrote: >> The problem with this is that now someone has to fish the fonts out of there >> and install them where they are actually recognized for presenting the >> document. If LibreOffice is updated to automate the capture of fonts and >> their extraction again, aren't we back to the previously-unsolved problem? > > I don't know. Is this what has happened to the .pdf files? Why could not ODF > use some form of embedded fonts as Adobe Acrobat does now? There doesn't seem > to be a problem with this.
As I understand it, PDF files don't usually embed the whole font; they just embed the parts needed to make the document in question render correctly in the case where the document is being represented as text (since PDF is actually able to encapsulate many different ways to represent a document). When it's used, the font is included in the rendering computation of the reader program, and is never installed on any target system. Not that it could be since the font will be incomplete anyway. For ODF, since the format is intended to be editable, the font that was embedded would need to be complete and capable of being installed on any platform where that editing might take place so that any text can be edited. To my eyes that poses substantial problems, such as: * Installing fonts dynamically on any platform, seamlessly on document-load * Removing those fonts dynamically, including knowing when to do so * Managing the licensing for fonts so that ODF does not promote copyright infringement While it might be possible to devise kludgey solutions, each of those issues is a substantial bear-trap and the first two in particular would favour implementations that have no interest in being platform-independent. While it would indeed be lovely if a miracle happened, it seems to me entirely reasonable that a truly open, cross-platform standard would choose not to attempt to devise solutions for these challenges. S. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
