Typophile

Photofont WebReady 1.0 by FontLab

twardoch

Web fonts are in everyone’s mouth. While the browser makers and the type industry agrees on a common standard for HTML font embedding (will it be .eot or .ttf/.otf with some special tables? — we shall see,) FontLab is offering a more immediate solution.

Web designers have used the Flash-based “sIFR” font replacement technique for a few years now to enhance their web pages with custom fonts of their choice. It is not perfect but works better than saving text as images: it at least allows searchability and copy-paste, plus it performs well on mobile devices that don’t support Flash.

FontLab’s new product Photofont WebReady is compatible with sIFR 2 but goes beyond its capabilities. It can create dynamic web headlines using not only OpenType and TrueType fonts but also using the Photofont font format. Photofont WebReady can also create bitmap-based dynamic web headlines from any OpenType and TrueType fonts, allowing a customized text appearance on the web while preventing extraction of font outlines out of Flash files.

Developed by FontLab, Photofont brings the beauty of full-color bitmap fonts (with alpha transparency) to print and web. After BitFonter (a bitmap font editor that can create photofonts) and Photofont Start (a plugin that allows using photofonts in Adobe Photoshop), Photofont WebReady is the next product in the Photofont line. Plugins that allow using photofonts in Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress are under development.

Photofont WebReady retails at US$79.95. For more information visit the Photofont WebReady product page at http://www.fontlab.com/photofont/webready/ and the Photofont technology page at http://www.photofont.com/.

Regards,
Adam Twardoch
Fontlab Ltd.

jupiterboy

Wonderful

Tiffany Wardle

I'm curious to know what other foundries think about this technology. I'd assume it is viewed as embedding still and so not allowed by most foundries and their EULAs.

twardoch

As far as I can tell, many foundries do not disallow font embedding in Flash files — or they are not specific about it. Photofont WebReady uses Flash as the container of the font.

However, I must say that we have explicitly taken a "protective" approach. Outline fonts (OpenType, TrueType) will be converted into outline-based Flash containers only if the font allows editable embedding. This was my reasoning because the functionality of the application is to create Flash font containers that allow rendering of arbitrary choice from outside of the Flash container. So this sort of embedding is "editable".

Since the bitmaps generated by a font are not subject to the same copyright protection as outlines (which are considered to be font software), my reasoning was that if the font's embedding permission disallow editable embedding, Photofont WebReady will still allow to embed the bitmaps of the font. However, if the font disallows embedding completely, Photofont WebReady will also disallow it (even for bitmaps).

Of course, Photofont WebReady still does provide a link to the Copyright string and the EULA of the font right on the first screen — so the user can consult the details.

There are a few sIFR-compatible font converters out there, but as far as I know, none of them respects the font vendors' rights to the same extent as Photofont WebReady.

Best,
Adam

Captured from web.archive.org on 3 Feb 2010. view this capture