On 27/06/11 11:06 PM, Simon Phipps wrote:
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:
1. * Installing fonts dynamically on any platform, seamlessly on document-load
2. * Removing those fonts dynamically, including knowing when to do so
3. * 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.
OO had the option to install fonts only for the use of OO, not system
wide use. This was done through spadmin I think. I wonder how that was
implemented.
Are 1 and 2 not effectively "add font to OO only on open, reload
document" and "remove font from OO only" on document close (if no other
open document requires those fonts.)
steve
--
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
