Hi list.I recently emailed a few indie font developers to get their opinions on EOT and @font-face. Here's the first response worth reading on the matter. Ray has given permission for his comments to be distributed to any interested browser developers.
— Nicholas Shanks. Begin forwarded message:
From: "Ray Larabie" Date: 3 November 2008 Hi Nicholas, Here's what I use to determine a good web font embedding system:Can the font be downloaded directly, thereby easily circumventing my license agreement?If yes, then I am against it. Can the format be easily hacked to extract the font?To me it doesn't matter. Nothing's easier than downloading a torrent so preventing this type of piracy is irrelevant. I'd prefer a moderate form of encryption at least to prevent direct downloading sans license. If you want me to explain further, I can.Can the font be restricted to a certain domain?It doesn't matter to me at all. If people want to pirate, people will pirate. I prefer no domain restrictions.What I don't like about EOT is that it was sloppily executed, at least the original release. I must admit that haven't tried it since 1999. I once generated an EOT that would corrupt the Windows font rasterizer so all text in Windows would go blank, so I don't know if it was thoroughly tested. The domain restriction was pointless (to me) and the conversion tools were less than robust. Perhaps I don't understand the concept. Is that to prevent remote linking to the fonts from other sites? I didn't have a problem with the concept of a proprietary web font format. The security was good enough - easy to crack but that doesn't matter. How difficult something is to crack is irrelevant. It just means the cracking tool is easier/ harder to write which means it will take crackers a few more days to write the tool. If the domain restrictions were taken out of EOT, I could sell my own preconverted EOTs.All the best, -- Ray Larabie www.typodermic.com
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