Hey Gang!
So after a ton of work on a Wordpress site for Font Diner, I was slapped in the face with the reality that Woo Commerce is an SEO turd and in turn have decided to start over using Shopify which turns out is an SEO champion!
Since Shopify is an all-in-one hosted solution it lead me to wonder about what would be the best way to do a testdrive feature for my new website. Previously I had used
http://www.typeshow.net/ to render images but it adds a bit of page load and is a little pokey.
The flip side is that I can use some sort of embedded web font testdriver as well but I'm a little concerned the fonts may be vulnerable to theft from browser caches.
Any recommendations folks? Thanks in advance for your insight!
Comments
jollygood test drive
It uses webfonts protected with fontsquirrel's "web only" obfuscation. That makes it no more and no less secure than using the font on the page itself.
»Web only« probably helps if you want to prevent desktop usage, but I does not prevent anyone from taking the web font and use it as web font on another domain.
– Are your typefaces already available to people interested in pirating it?
– Who do you optimize your business for? Pirates or actual customers?
– Will you lose or gain from making your typefaces easier to try, test, show to friends?
For me it is absolutely clear that trying to fight font piracy on the back of your paying customers is a losing proposition. I’m repeating myself on Typedrawers when it comes to this topic, but I couldn’t be more convinced by this: my time is best used by making our customers happier. It definitely isn’t well spent (or making me happy, for that matter) by trying to make font pirates’ life a tiny bit harder.
Just make a web font tester and be done with it. At this point, everything else is a useless waste of time.
Dalton Maag not only have a web font tester but encourage downloading and sharing their retail fonts for non-commerical usage. It will be interesting to see if any enforcement actions become public in the next few years.
In fact I had a conversation with the creator of the code who indicated he's not interested in supporting it any further but I believe he would be open to having the code updated and even made into a Wordpress plug-in.
I'm happy to put up some funds to commission this work if there is interest by other folks.
On a cheap webspace supporting the popular CMSs WordPress or Typo3 PHP-GD will be installed, as many popular plug-ins or extensions need GD. I usually install it per default on servers for shared hosting. But I doubt that PHP-GD-freetype is installed on cheap webspaces. Never had such a demand from a customer. Others like PDF rendering is demanded sometimes.
It's questionable if a plugin for WP is a good way. WP is a big security hole itself. A provider will want extra money for special needs like FreeType or HarfBuzz, and maybe for additional ressources to provide performance. Would need a try how fast it is to render a few letters. Not so bad I guess.
The code of TypeShow looks well structured and modern, but isn't maintained since 2013 years. It's so small, that it can be ported to any other language. An API would be a better option, just a few parameters via AJAX and get an image back.
It's also questionable if FreeType or HarfBuzz is needed. For my application of font identification it's not essential. This just needs some metrics of each glyph and a rendered image of each character (or a subset), which can be done in batch once for each font and store a special fingerprint in a database. This wouldn't even need a font, because it also works with images from a scanned book page or a specimen catalog. Or grab the image from a font shop.
This doesn't avoid that somebody, which didn't sign an EULA directly, grabs the font from a website or extracts it from PDF. If it's a trivial creation then it's not protected by copyright. Nearly all text fonts are considered trivial creations (handycraft and not art) by jurisdictions in most countries.
That's why I suggested to use a simple API/service instead.
Font identification is actually something different. Showing font previews based on image based data sounds like a bad idea.
Of course a small widget in any frontend (WP, Typo3, others) using an API is more flexible. This can be pure JS + CSS. If this is convenient, depends on the number of different fonts to display.
In summary the development costs of API + customisable widget are a little bit higher, but the result is more reusable and flexible. For the API-Backend anything can be used. And the widget needs only HTML around it.