Dustin Wilson

EDIT: It's come to my attention that it appears that I was incorrect in my assessment that Kestrel and Firefox 3 both supported font embedding. Apparently the browsers were picking up the typeface that I had installed on my machine rather than one I was embedding. I write about it here.

Citation: .Imelda/Flickr

In June of 2006 Håkon Wium Lie, everybody's favorite CTO, wrote an article for CNET entitled "Microsoft's forgotten monopoly" where he calls on browser developers to start adding support for font embedding. A year and a half ago this sparked debate among typophiles whether it was a good or a bad idea. Safari has since answered the call and added support for it in Safari 3. Opera, with Kestrel, has support for it. Firefox 3 will have support for it as well it appears by using my own tests. Kestrel's embedding appears to be a bit buggy however, forcing usage of a heaver font weight on embedded typefaces on large point sizes.

Like with everything else there are supporters and non-supporters of this. Most of the non-supporters argue that many people without a single lick of design skills will begin to use typefaces that are substandard. They make a very good point here. A quick visit to any free font website will turn up thousands of typefaces that were created without the care many type designers take when creating their commercial fonts. A golden rule in this matter is that if the font is a free font (not pirated) and doesn't have Ray Larabie as the creator it's crap. There are exceptions to this rule, however. There are some websites today that do use typefaces that aren't of the standard web fonts (Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, etc.) but aren't embedded fonts. They instead specify the typefaces in their CSS font-family properties. If you have the typefaces specified you get to view the website with those typefaces. This for people who do have a wide collection of typefaces can be abused as much as those. Take Joe Clark's blog for example. Anyone with the Zapfino typeface (any Mac user will have it by default) will have their eyes bleeding upon visiting that website. He is one of the world's leaders in web accessibility yet he uses a typeface which is difficult to read even at moderate point sizes. I use Zapfino in my Garden of Dreams design for My Opera, but the font is quite large. My argument here is that even people with knowledge about typefaces will abuse them.

Why would abuse be a problem in the first place? Aren't color and animated gifs abused already on places such as MySpace? Why are designers as a whole afraid of this? A good web designer has a job because he/she can organize and design content that is more pleasurable, so if people without a creative lobe in their brain wants to use hideous fonts let them. The gap between ugly design and beautiful, effective design will be larger.

The second problem the non-supporters bring up concerns copyright law and the embedding flag within font files themselves. Most people do not know the technology behing font files, but it's more complicated than most people think. Typography is a very difficult field to belong to, and a lot of the minute details of creating a typeface isn't common knowledge. That's why for the most part commercial typefaces are superior to free ones as the people making them are trying to make a living at what they're good at. There are exceptions just like with quality free fonts. Some argue that copyright law prohibits embedding of any typeface, but that's incorrect. Fonts are prohibited from being embedded only when the embedding flag is turned to false on its font file. If it is true then it can be embedded wherever you so please it to be as long as you, the person embedding the typeface, have paid for it. Anyone who has to distribute PDF files might run into typefaces that cannot be embedded. The same would apply for the web. There are some typefaces out there that are of quality and do allow embedding, but they are few and far between. That's another problem the non-supporters bring up.

Not too long ago many people wrote open letters to Adobe requesting that they open a small list of their favorite typefaces to the web. With each person's open letter there was a different set of typefaces. I found this to be a waste of time because many of the typefaces they were requesting Adobe had no rights to except to distribute them. Some such as Warnock Pro were designed and distributed by Adobe, but the vast majority of them weren't. Even if Adobe owned all of the typefaces opening those fonts to the web would cause them to lose revenue from the sale of those typefaces. I mentioned that font embedding probably would be a better solution. After I talked sense I had my intelligence questioned by Andrei Herasimchuk. I'm not a very egotistical man, but I think a "I told you so" is in order here. It's been two years and Adobe's done nothing and most likely won't. What makes it worse is that many of those requested typefaces aren't even designed to work well on the screen, many of them not even having a screen variant. The vast majority could be used at best for headers.

The third problem is pirating and theft. Unfortunately there is very little that can be done to keep someone from downloading typefaces that are embedded within a CSS document. People with knowledge and access to their server's filesystem can adjust permissions on the font files to limit usage of the typefaces. That approach would keep the vast majority of people from downloading the font, but people with knowledge of how to curcumvent the protection could still get the files if they wanted to. Microsoft tried to solve this problem by working with Monotype to create the Embedded OpenType format (or EOT for short). The format was essentially a subsetted digital rights managed font format. Using Microsoft's tool you could specify what websites the typeface would only work on. I'm unsure why this didn't catch on. Microsoft probably didn't open the EOT format to the rest of the browsers and it died as a user-unfriendly proprietary Microsoft technology. Typefaces are the most pirated piece of software on the planet, and allowing for embedding for all of these typefaces would cause a big problem but not a problem that doesn't already exist. A simple torrent search would turn up thousands of commercial typefaces and typeface collections. Fonts are easily downloadable already. That doesn't mean a format doesn't need to be created for usage when embedding typefaces. Adobe, a type foundry itself, has created a font obfuscator tool for usage in their Mars format, a method for embedding PDF in XML. There's no reason why that specification couldn't be adapted into a standard for the web. In fact the first comment in that linked log post asks the same question.

I personally think Opera, Safari, and Mozilla are taking the right approach to this, at least the right approach as long as there isn't a common concensus as to how to obfuscate fonts for embedding on the web.