Chris Cabanillas has written a wonderful and insightful piece on the current frustration that is licensed typography and the web:
“I’d like to show this post to you in FF Meta Serif but I can’t. Foundries would like you to be able to use their fonts on the web but they can’t just give their work away so they must wait for the technology.”
I agree strongly with Chris that technologies like sIFR are — with respect to Shaun and Mike — not a good solution. It doesn’t scale well, and to be blunt removes much of a typeface’s personality in the process of converting it into an image.
I’m simply not a fan of using flash-and-or-java-and-bitmaps to overcome typographical challenges. Irrespective of how brilliant the use of the technology might be. And it shouldn’t have to be this way, as most modern Operating Systems can render font families pretty darn well.
With the advent of Cleartype, even Windows has the ability to do a half-decent job. Yet here we are, still, converting typefaces to poor-quality low resolution images — to avoid breaching any typeface licensing — in order that we may inject some form of typographical colour to an otherwise vanilla-like pallet.
Converting typefaces to bitmap images, then, clearly isn’t the answer and in a way permits the world to embrace a second-best option rather than actually confront what has been traditionally placed into the “too hard” basket. If a fast and efficient methodology allowed for real time vector creation — given it’s wondrously crisp scaling capabilities — then one might be on to something.
But even that is a cop out, to a degree, as it’s still not necessarily rendering a typeface as the designer intended. Right now image replacement is an ugly, inefficient and wasteful process that simply doesn’t have any advantages. The alternative standard means I will have to keep on using Verdana, Palatino Linotype or other open-licensed typefaces.
“But, I think the only way we get there is if a web designer, a typeface designer, and a type developer get together over coffee and hash this out. If we leave it to a committee it may never happen.”
Chris poses some excellent questions and thoughts — if you’ve not subscribed to Restiffbard yet, I highly recommend that you do.
≡ This is a brief remainders entry relating to the topics of design, links, standards, typography and written in response to an external article, comment or opinion — refer linked article for completeness and context.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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