Be Using It... August 19 2008
T here’s nothing new under the sun. The issue of fonts on the Web is exactly the same problem that had to be tackled in the 1980s for word-processing documents which were designed to be printed, and then had to be sent to someone else who might not have the fonts used in them.
The font industry was seriously concerned about any technology which would encourage font piracy. I remember those days. There were plenty of people who’d just make copies of fonts and give them away, or put them on a disk with a document they were sending to a professional printer; it seemed like few people understood, or cared, that someone had spent a lot of money making them.
It was a critical issue for the Microsoft Word team, who were farsighted enough to realize that for any solution to work, it would have to have the support of the font industry. So they asked for its input.
K.I.A. in the “Browser Wars”
The eventual solution was Embedded TrueType, which later became Embedded OpenType (EOT).
EOT was never designed to be a heavy-duty Digital Rights Management system. It was designed only to prevent casual piracy, or piracy by ignorance.
The TrueType font format was extended to store a set of “embedding bits” which allowed the font creator to specify whether and how it could be embedded in documents.
The two most-commonly used levels were Read Only, and Editable (which stored the whole font so the document could be edited). In both cases, the font was still tied for use only with that document.
“EOT was never designed to be a heavy-duty DRM system. It was designed only to prevent casual piracy, or piracy by ignorance.”
When it was clear that the Web presented all the same issues with fonts, the obvious solution for us was to extend the technology we already had to address the new medium.
That’s when it got complicated. This all came up in 1995, when we were competing fiercely against Netscape, one of whose founders, Marc Andreesen, had vowed to use Web UI to reduce the role of Windows to “a poorly-debugged set of device drivers”.
There was no way Netscape would adopt a solution from Microsoft. So they licensed another system from Bitstream – one we felt was lower-quality, because it stripped out the font hints.
It was an intensely competitive environment. And that made us do something which made sense at the time, but with hindsight turned out to be a mistake. We kept EOT as proprietary Microsoft technology, instead of offering it up as a Web Standard.
Two competing font embedding systems meant neither had any chance of becoming a standard. No-one used either solution much.
It was still the same just over a year ago.
Now the whole topic has heated up again, first because it has never been solved and won’t go away until it is, and second because the Open Source community came up with the concept of Font Linking, or storing raw font files on a server where they could be called by any page.
Bid To Make EOT A Web Standard
I agree with the font industry’s belief that Font Linking would pave the way to widespread font piracy.
That’s why no font End User License Agreement that I know of permits it, except on exorbitant terms.
Over the years since we first introduced font embedding, Web standards have become much stronger and more sophisticated. I have advocated strongly inside Microsoft that we wholeheartedly support them – and I’m far from being a lone voice.
We launched a project to make EOT an open format and a W3C standard, and that proposal is now before the W3C, which is setting up a working group.
Meantime, Internet Explorer still supports EOT embedding, as it has since 1996. And I hope you’re seeing the fonts Cambria, Calibri and Candara which have been embedded in this page.
Those were among six new fonts which shipped with Office 2007 and Windows Vista. Just as Verdana and Georgia allowed us to raise the quality bar by optimizing for low-resolution screens, those six fonts were all optimized for ClearType.
Understanding how to design and hint the features to take advantage of ClearType allowed us to raise the bar yet again.