The Next Font Format?

Ray Larabie

Yes, just like Musicbrainz. I could also be used for listing usage tips such as keyboard shortcuts, OT features, pilcrows. Useful, quick-lookup type of stuff rather than a full manual.

Dave Crossland

How about security issues, encryption & co?

That's what was discussed earlier in the thread using the jargon word "DRM", or Digital Restrictions Management.

Your use of the word encryption reminds me of this good and relatively short essay: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ is also a good read on this, in the context of music.

Today I learned some new trivia about this at TypeCon, as this question came up at the end of Thomas Phinney's workshop on font troubleshooting. He said in the last 35 years Adobe had developed 3 font DRM schemes, and the 3rd was never launched because it can't make good business sense.

Dave Crossland

As reported by Georg Seifert of GlyphsApp and Joel Galeran of FontSelf, it seems none of the OpenType color font formats support cymk or spot colors for reliable printing of color fonts, but there is a big demand for this.

Thomas Phinney

Dave Crossland said:

How about security issues, encryption & co?

That's what was discussed earlier in the thread using the jargon word "DRM", or Digital Restrictions Management.

Your use of the word encryption reminds me of this good and relatively short essay: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ is also a good read on this, in the context of music.

Today I learned some new trivia about this at TypeCon, as this question came up at the end of Thomas Phinney's workshop on font troubleshooting. He said in the last 35 years Adobe had developed 3 font DRM schemes, and the 3rd was never launched because it can't make good business sense.

(Belatedly)

Yes: witness that Adobe had abandoned each of its previous font DRM schemes at some point earlier, as well. The costs of supporting DRM for fonts are huge. Additionally, in many cases the costs would not be born by the same parties that benefit from the DRM; the OS and browser vendors have little motivation to support font DRM. Adobe was in a unique place to be the best positioned to implement and benefit, and still couldn’t make a reasonable long-term business case for it.

The fundamental problem with font DRM is that fonts are system resources, not just a media stream: you can’t give access to everything important about a font without... giving access to everything important about the font, such that it could be reconstituted. Sophisticated consuming apps need a lot of access.

Impossible is a strong word. But I will say that *serious* font DRM is at least really impractical—the balance of costs and benefits has shifted considerably for the negative since the last time Adobe gave up on it.  The number of players needing low-level access to fonts is much larger, and some of them are in the open source community... I just don’t see it returning any time soon.

Thomas Phinney

Dave Crossland said:

As reported by Georg Seifert of GlyphsApp and Joel Galeran of FontSelf, it seems none of the OpenType color font formats support cymk or spot colors for reliable printing of color fonts, but there is a big demand for this.

Agreed. I wrote about this limitation on the Fontlab twitter feed (October 1st).

As I noted then, technically, the Apple SBIX color bitmap format supports PNG, JPEG and TIFF... and TIFF supports CMYK. So, somebody could try SBIX-TIFF-CMYK—although I for one would not want to bet on whether such a thing would work in all environments that support SBIX fonts! Or any given environment you haven’t specifically tested, really.

Plus, SBIX is bitmap-only, which is obviously not a great choice for printing, where resolutions tend to be higher.

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

Dave Crossland said:

As reported by Georg Seifert of GlyphsApp and Joel Galeran of FontSelf, it seems none of the OpenType color font formats support cymk or spot colors for reliable printing of color fonts, but there is a big demand for this.

As far as I know, SVG 2.0 add support for ICC colors, allowing to specify CMYK color with RGB fallback, like:

<circle fill="#CD853F device-cmyk(0.11, 0.48, 0.83, 0.00)"/>

Theoretically, it's possible to use CMYK in OpenTypeSVG fonts, but most probably no software will support it yet.

Dave Crossland

I remembered this old thread after the most recent video call this morning of the mpeg "ad hoc group" (https://lists.aau.at/mailman/listinfo/mpeg-otspec). Good times!