Uh, yepp. We spend way too much time on that 20% CSS doesn't handle particularly well. Sorting out formatting problems in webpages designed with CSS has long been a major time waster for me. It's just plain deadline-threatening. CSS's failings are typical of the developmental bungling the W3C are reknown for. The fact I'd rather have a new biro should tell you everything. Also try: eating glass.

Thanks for the link Joe :^)

j a m e s

The guys at the W3C always say the cutest things when they pull their heads out of their asses long enough to talk.

"will soon be so passé"

Well, I didn't hear him say 'will soon be', so, I would have to say that I think it's certainly plausible that at some point, yea, this will be the way to go...especially for publishing entities that need to publish massive amounts of content to multiple media.

"The guys at the W3C always say the cutest things when they pull their heads out of their asses long enough to talk."

No matter how evil some folks think the W3C is, I'll take them any day over 'standards' dictated by Adobe and Microsoft.

I don't think they're evil Darrel, but misguided, and compromised by the commercial interests which decide what directions the steering committee recommends. That committee is made up of professionals from Mightgosoft and Abode, and the W3C itself is funded by massive contributions from them and other software companies involved in the business of making crummy software.

I'm equally critical of the 'standards' pushed by MS and Adobe. Their software blows goats. What WC3 delivers is seldom any better. But I hope you're right in saying this is the way to go---provided CSS can be made to deliver what we need it to. Proliferation of multiple media publishing should drive it closer.

j a m e s

Watching the video, I get the impression that Prince is really a print-based 'browser' so-to-speak. In other words, it's a product that actually supports the CSS features that make print design a lot easier that most current browsers either ignore or mess up.

So, that's probably a good thing.

No doubt that the W3C is influenced by corporate entities. I still find that better than just having corporate entities state the standard (not that microsoft and aobobe don't already do that...). ;0)

A print-based browser, yes. That's what it looks like. If it's dedicated to print it might end up handling that medium properly as the de facto standard for CSS, leaving online browsers to catch up.

No doubt that the W3C is influenced by corporate entities. I still find that better than just having corporate entities state the standard (not that microsoft and aobobe don’t already do that...

Beyond question, yes.

j a m e s

Yes, admittedly not “soon.” But he means “sooner rather than later.”

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

I like that CSS will get more and more of those features, but I don't get the general point of that talk. They claim that they have invented the perfect way of automatic typesetting, whereas in Word or InDesign there are those sad people doing point and click to get the job done. Haven't they heard that every text and layout application uses stylesheets? And with much better results ...

And about web fonts: I like the fact that they try to push it, but Larabie/Steffmann fonts as the future of web and print? OMG!

And about web fonts: I like the fact that they try to push it, but Larabie/Steffmann fonts as the future of web and print? OMG!

Ah, they're just hedging for the popular angle, something contentious to make people read it. Or maybe they're on a bum steer. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

j a m e s

"but I don’t get the general point of that talk."

I think it was just to show off a particular technology...one that would (in theory) reduce the workload of a publisher that needs to accommodate multiple mediums. Instead of typesetting it for print, then formatting it for the web, you'd do it once, for both mediums, via HTML and CSS.

I think it's definitely more of a 'in theory' thing right now, but I can definitely see hos there is some appeal to this down the road for high volume publishers (such as the newspaper they used in the example in the beginning).

Until the web starts to allow more finesse and control across browsers and platforms, it's hard to imagine one application that can handle both the precision required for print design and the flexibility required by the web.

That said, I know nothing about css. But I do know that for a lot of designers, code is fairly anti-intuitive to work with. I have a background in print (hence Quark, InDesign) and can fumble my way through Dreamweaver because it's aimed at users like me who need to actually see something rather than just write code, but when it comes to html, I leave that to the programmers.

Back in the day, typesetting was done by typesetters, design by designers. The Mac changed all that, now most designers I know do their own typesetting (for better or worse). If the software gets too far removed from the physical act of designing, you'll start to partition things off again. I work with web programmers when I need to get a site done, but I'm not going to want to hire out for my typesetting.

"Until the web starts to allow more finesse and control across browsers and platforms, it’s hard to imagine one application that can handle both the precision required for print design and the flexibility required by the web."

Well, I think that's the intent of this particular application.

"But I do know that for a lot of designers, code is fairly anti-intuitive to work with. "

CSS isn't really more complicated than understanding proper styles in XPress or Indesign.

Getting CSS to work PROPERLY in browsers takes some work, but the appeal of this Prince application is that it seems to fully support CSS *as intended*. Which is rare, unfortunately.

So I wonder which major newspaper will take their workflow from Quark to CSS.

The presenters’ insistence that HTML-CSS-Prince handles “most” requirements (more than 80%) will, I suspect, be antithetical to the real typographers who read this forum. I think we spend rather a lot of time on that other 20%.

True, but that doesn't necessarily influence the dominance of production tools and workflows. Quark Xpress managed to grab most of the page layout market for a long time while supporting somewhat less than 80% of typographic sophistication; indeed, so much less that Dean Allen used to call it anti-typographic.

What I think the non-coders are missing is that a lot of the design we are doing now IS XML-based, or approaching it. For instance, although not a design program, Microsoft Word now uses XML.

XHTML and CSS is XML, so we shouldn't be too far off from having a design program that can automatically spit it out properly encoded text. No programming required.

The issue is having a comprehensive enough CSS specification that covers more than the 80% of what we're talking about. IF, and it's a big if, we can get the specification to reach at least the level of sophistication of say, Pagemaker, that's a lot of design that can be accomplished.

Yeah, but you’re doing it wrong if you start with styled text in an unpublished format (like MS Word, Quark, or InDesign) and then try to output to HTML. Your result will be tag soup and will be unusable on any modern site.

I have had more-than-satisfactory results with a workflow of valid HTML → MS Word → InDesign → tagged PDF. I start with and end up with published, accessible formats, and one of the intermediate formats lets me twiddle with typography and page layout to my heart’s content. (It bothers me that InDesign cannot simply inhale a valid [X]HTML file directly.)

I feel I am reasonably informed on the topic and I am pretty sure that even Prince would not do what I want. Typesetting a single page that varies its number of columns is punishingly difficult in CSS yet readily achieved in InDesign, for example. Then there are the issues of ligature substitution, swash characters, and real H&J. (Hyphenation is rather glossed over in the video; it’s viewed as being present or absent. I would like to know how I prevent a word from being hyphenated in Prince, for example.)

Even if John is right, the baseline has been raised. For Prince to achieve 80% of InDesign is a much taller order than PageMaker’s achieving 80% of whatever came before it. (And if that was 80% of the crapola CompuGraphic photosetters I worked on, well, how hard was that?)

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

Am I wrong, or are there not plenty of newspapers and magazines still using their own custom developed page layout systems designed to coordinate out put with invoicing systems for ad space? Something Quark and Indesign didn't do before, and something I don't quite see CSS handling. The applications I know best are for making signs, and they can track inventory, billable hours, etc. and spit out an invoice when you are done. I imagine a newspaper publisher would expect nothing less. Does CSS do that and if it does, is it still a cascading style sheet?

Also, I hear so many 80% / 20% rules lately... "80% of your problems are caused by 20% of your (whatever)", "80% of you profits come from 20% of your customers (or products, or ideas)", and so on... It just seems to me that if you are going to pick a number and say "up to this point is good and you don't really need the rest", then, don't pick 80%. (82.5% is better. ;o) These rules almost always make it seem as though it's the 20% that you really want.

-=®=-

The CCI system used at the Seattle Times is exactly such a system. It was originally designed to aid the layout of time-intensive, text and ad heavy publications like phone books. It was and is not a typographically advanced system, no ligatures I'm afraid. It handles the bulk of the design work though, since ads constitute the bulk of a paper.

For graphically intense pages without ads, like our Entertainment and Arts Page 1, we use InDesign and Illustrator because we need more control over that final 17.5%

And don't even begin to talk about classified advertising, because my head will explode.

Will CSS handle this? Perhaps a sophisticated enough CSS spec could handle the layout of a dimestore novel respectably, but something as complex as a multi-page newspaper needs to not only be well specified, but also brutally error-free and as steady as a rock.

Which we all know web design/xhtml/css to NOT be. (See Exhibit A, Internet Explorer, any version.)

Sure, this is using proper CSS, but XML/SGML + stylesheets have been used for print for years. Recall being interviewed for a job of this kind in 1996. Technical publisher stored all their content in XML, used stylesheets to output to various paper formats, CDRom, later web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Professional_Publisher_%28XPP%29

As a half and half designer/coder, it is an increasing frustration that stylesheets in Quark/Indesign only go so far - you can't instantly rework a document from A4 to US letter, or make all 1st level headings within the 'further information' section of the page blue using stylesheets alone.

"For instance, although not a design program, Microsoft Word now uses XML."

As does InDesign, actually.

Ultimately, it'd be nice to see a company like Adobe embrace a product like this and incorporate it into their own DTP apps.

However, knowing MS and Adobe, they don't really like those open standards and prefer to keep to themselves. ;o)

(To be fair, I think Adobe has been a bit better in this regard than MS has)

"No programming required."

Well, for the record, CSS as it is now isn't really programming. It's just learning a bit of syntax. Really no different than learning prepress terms, or how to bind a book, etc. Just another publishing medium.

"I feel I am reasonably informed on the topic and I am pretty sure that even Prince would not do what I want. Typesetting a single page that varies its number of columns is punishingly difficult in CSS yet readily achieved in InDesign, for example."

Joe, have you used Prince yet? I haven't, but if you do, I'd love your opinion. I agree that for a web browser, using CSS for varying columns is a huge PITA at the moment. Prince, however, seems to actually support CSS-3 fully, which DOES allow for columnar layouts. One example: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/CSS3_Columns

I agree, this is not a replacement for InDesign now. I am thrilled by the potential it has down the road, though.

"I know best are for making signs, and they can track inventory, billable hours, etc. and spit out an invoice when you are done. I imagine a newspaper publisher would expect nothing less. Does CSS do that and if it does, is it still a cascading style sheet?"

I have no answer for that (though would love to hear one). But, to add to the topic, it seems as if most successful papers are moving a lot of their ad revenue towards their online existence as advertiser depend less and less on the print medium for advertising. So this may very well become a nice addition to, rather than replacement of, current systems. It's been a decade since I've worked in a paper, though (which, at the time, was MS Word, cut and pasted into XPress [and then printed, cut, and waxed onto the keylines...those were the days...] and then cut and pasted into a primitive HTML editor where we published each article manually onto a static HTML site.)

"Which we all know web design/xhtml/css to NOT be. (See Exhibit A, Internet Explorer, any version.)"

Again, Prince isn't a web browser. It's a HTML/XML to PDF renderer. The appeal is that it does support a much fuller set of the CSS spec (especially for print) than any current web browser.

"Sure, this is using proper CSS, but XML/SGML + stylesheets have been used for print for years."

Excellent point. Doesn't Framemaker also use SGML or a subset thereof?

I think the idea, though, is that everyone touches HTML/XML these days, if not a fuller SGML subset. So this product probably hits a few more of the pragmatic buzzwords out there.

At some point there was something called XSL-FO (formatting objects) flying around, with the express purpose of producing fully formatted paginated documents and PDFs from XML.
Does anyone know what happened to that?

"Excellent point. Doesn’t Framemaker also use SGML or a subset thereof?"
Last time I used Framemaker (admittedly, a few years ago) it worked quite well with XML (although it had to translate it into its own native markup). The most impressive thing about Framemaker was its very powerful stylesheet system to which nothing I've seen comes close.

(I believe) We used Framemaker for for classified ads in one of the local papers I worked for. They would output their fully marked-up text, about 12 pages of classifieds, and we would input that into Pagemaker. We had style substitutions set up, so all we had to do was let it flow, ad display ads, then tweak to fit.

Google is barking up an interesting tree, but it's still the wrong one. What I would much rather see is a tool like InDesign that can actually output usable HTML/CSS! Why use CSS for typesetting? Back Asswards.

Outputting a typeset PDF deserves a (one handed golf clap) applause. But getting a decent layout application that works flawlessly is a whole other thing. Writing CSS still requires a developer to sit down and write code. We've gone miles beyond hand-writing Post Script, but we're not there close with HTML/CSS editors. We're 10 years out from the time the original WYSIWYG editors came out (NetObjects, GoLive) and still no serious web developers worth their salt use (or admit to using) WYSIWYG tools because they introduce too much error and require hand-coding. (Modern browser suckage is as much to blame as the people behind Dreamweaver.)

(I realize the term WYSIWYG is probably also passé... but you get my drift.)

> Why use CSS for typesetting? Back Asswards.

Amen. How much professional typography experience do these gentlemen actually have?

professional typography experience

Hey, Once you know what a serif is, some places you get to call yourself an expert.

-=®=-

Once you know what a serif is, some places you get to call yourself an expert.

(Or as someone said to me in Iqaluit, "an 'expert' is someone from South of 60, with slides" (in the days before PowerPoint).

Amazing -- we all agree on something.

I've learned some basic CSS because I had to for a client (to post some of their stuff on a website I did not design in the first place), not because I wanted to. ;-) And as much as I think Dreamweaver is terrifically useful for sketching-out things like tables that can be intricate (WYSIWYG is rather passé, as Joe has noted, although it does have its moments), I find that I still do most of my coding by hand.

But to make a blanket statement like this shows an incomparable amount of ignorance -- heaven forfend, even "lead" users are anything but extinct!

InDesign will go away when printing goes away, which is sooner than people think. Everyone will cry for a while about how good type was in the days of InDesign and "desktop publishing" and lament that "they just don't make 'em like they used to". Then type on screens will get better and everyone will forget, except for a few grey hairs on Typophile :)

Technologies tend to coexist more often then they throttle each other to death.

Christian, do you want to speculate as to a date?

I swear they said the same thing about the "paperless office."

Sometimes you just gotta hold something in your hand.

Technologies usually don't go away completely, but their use tends to become more specialized as they are replaced. The paperless office is actually a good example. Sure we still use printers, and there is still paper around the office, but they are used very differently. Paper now tends to be very temporary. It is almost always a copy of something that already exists in digital form. It may be a handout for a meeting, or a note to be thrown away, but it's rare that people have binders and filing cabinets full of things they intend to keep. More often for that type of thing you hear "can you send me a digital copy?". What's more, that transition is far from over. Offices are still populated by "digital immigrants". The new generation of natives use the technologies very differently, and they certainly aren't printing out everything they read like the old folks.

Another good example of this would be handwriting itself. Whereas handwriting used to be used for everything, it was replaced in large part by printing. It was replaced further by typewriters and morse code. Computers, personal printers and email further relegated it to a niche purpose. Texting and t9 have even replaced it for notes passed under the desk in junior high school. Now it's rare that we use handwriting to communicate with anyone but ourselves, rarely over distances, and almost never archivally. Sometimes it serves a nostalgic or ceremonial purpose, like for handwritten thank you notes.

Interestingly, the same thing happens with words as they are replaced by new ones: the old words take on more specialized meanings.

As for a date where printing will be gone from the face of the earth: probably never. As for a date where it started to fade, just look at the sales charts for paper newspapers, paperback books and annual report design, to name a few. Moving forward the act of stamping ink on paper will likely fill a niche purpose, at best for something useful or artistic, at worst for nostalgia alone. Unfortunately there will be typographic quality lost in the translation (ie that last 20%), especially at first.

Good old 201Clead201D users, how 201Cquaint201D.

Christian, I think there's no doubt that the mix is changing, with more going digital. How far it will go to my thinking depends partly on how good screens get. Have you seen the new Amazon 'Kindle' screen with text on it? I haven't, and I'm wondering if it really is 'digital paper.'

We print things out or buy print on paper when we want to read anything extended. And the preference for readers, probably based on physiology and psychology of reading is for small type--12 pt and under. That means to my thinking that screens won't substitute for paper until there are high resolution screens--at least 300 dpi,and maybe up to 1200. And then, I don't know. As Yogi Berra said, prediction is really hard, especially when it comes to the future :)

"InDesign will go away when printing goes away"

I don't think it has much to do with the medium. InDesign will go away when a proper typesetting tool replaces it. CSS is not it.

"Ah, they’re just hedging for the popular angle, something contentious to make people read it. Or maybe they’re on a bum steer. I wouldn’t take it too seriously."

You are completely wrong there. Håkon Lie seriously claims that such free fonts are "good enough" for general use, and has been working very hard to prevent the adoption of any web font scheme that would work with retail/commercial fonts.

I'm a bit bemused by folks putting down Adobe-promoted standards relating to typography. I take it PostScript, Type 1 and now OpenType have not solved real problems and you didn't like them?

Cheers,

T

Christian, I don't think you have completely argued the notion of "also" away. You have made some great points however. And I don't disagree with them.

Still lingering or malingering does go on. Vinyl sales are up in a big way....

I also think we don't disagree so much as maybe differ over degree of certainty.

And maybe we are thinking about different time scales as well. In 100 years I think we can't hope to imagine what's in store - I think thats the period I was arbitrarily thinking of for whatever reason. But where things will be in 20 years from now... I think you are describing that quite well.

Long term though - I think that at polyform state of existence for text/letters in the far furure is the safest bet of all.

As to the original post, I fail to see the scandal. Forget all the rhetorics (20% vs 80%, death of InDesign), just stick to what he actually presented.*
The presentation makes it clear that Mr Lie is not a typographer, see his selection of 'good' typefaces or the fact that he does not seem much interested in OpenType except for the fancier features. I do not even care since in the more fundamental issues he is pretty right: The HTML+CSS model is (or allows to be) quite strict in separating two independent domains which are, first, structured data, and second, (graphic or typographic) representation of these.

I think that in the long run, typographers will need to think of design in a more structured and abstract way. Designing nice books or brochures manually and individually by placing frames on a virtual page and filling these with given texts or images, is one thing. It is another thing to 'design' design rules -- the actual design results from (automatically) merging data and design rules. This is nothing to be afraid of, it can help make the design process more efficient. And this does not necessarily result in a loss of quality: What did the most traditional book designers do? Define the design rules. See the beautiful sketches by Jan Tschichold or Max Caflisch.
With this in mind, I consider ther HTML+CSS approach as pretty interesting. Another example is DocScape (cannot find an English version). This system allows to program very complex design rules, and one command will merge these with texts and images from any database and generate a PDF of an entire catalog or book. Its developers claim that this is much different from scripting layouts in InDesign or XPress in that these fill fixed template pages or frames with content while in their system the layout by default is supposed to be programmed such that it can deal with texts and images of various length or size, e.g. using two columns instead of three.
'Defining design' rather than 'designing' requires that designers or typographers are able to think of design abstractly.** And to make designers (myself included) feel comfortable with this it needs appropriate visually oriented tools. This is a particularly interesting question for which I have not seen solution. How would such a tool represent a layout, and allow designing it, if there is no 'content' yet? Would it be possible to create such a layout visually nevertheless -- and also show which parts of the layout are fixed and which parts remain variable? In short, how to represent virtual representation of data?
Nobody seems to have made an attempted to address this. Current solutions either force designers to fix text and image snippets on a digital page (PageMaker, XPress, InDesign), or require developers rather than designers (like LiveCycle, can anybody explain this to me in an afternoon?). There is nothing inbetween.

*  I think it was Mr Lie who made an interesting remark in the presentation: The actual typographic representation, which also includes things like hyphenation or optical margin alignment, is not up to CSS itself but to the browser or PDF generator.
**  For this reason, web designers and developers may easier adapt than print designers. Also I am not surprised that all these technologies, PrinceXML, but also AIR and WPF emerged from the web & UI design rather than the print world. My impression is that currently there are pretty exciting things under way, including the above-mentioned technologies. Many of these have the potential to change the way we think of design: By allowing to address document (or print) design, web design, UI design in the same 'language' they may help overcome the strict distinction of these three -- they have more in common than previous design tools (special tools for each of them) suggested. The real distinction is between data and their representation. The same data can be represented in a book or on the screen, or these data may be opend up for manipulation, then the form of representation turns out to be a UI.)

As an aside, it is with more or less automatic design in mind that I think that fonts need to be spaced and kerned well enough that no or very little intervention by the typographer is required. And OpenType helps a lot with this.

Karsten

"Why use CSS for typesetting? Back Asswards."

Not at all. That's the very point of CSS. No different than style sheets in your DTP apps.

"Amen. How much professional typography experience do these gentlemen actually have?"

How much typographical experience do 90% of inDesign users have? ;o)

"I don’t think it has much to do with the medium. InDesign will go away when a proper typesetting tool replaces it. CSS is not it."

CSS isn't a typesetting tool in and of itself. It's style markup language. Consider it like printers marks on the margins of a proof. Given that a lot of content is now being natively stored in XHTML and XML and the like, CSS seems like a perfectly logical extension. Now, whether or not Prince is 'the tool' is certainly debatable, but I certainly see CSS as the future. Rather than XPress styles, InDesign styles, Word Styles, we'd have one standard: CSS. If anything, and if the moons align, we might see InDesign eventually just use CSS natively within the application.

"I’m a bit bemused by folks putting down Adobe-promoted standards relating to typography."

Nothing wrong with [insert big software corporation] promoted standards. It's when they are also solely owned by said entity that some of us tend to start rooting for the open standard instead.

And yea, I can't think of any Type-centric standards that Adobe has created that have been anything BUT a boon to the industry. I, personally, just have qualms about the Adobe vs. Microsoft issues as we go forward in trying to agree on standardization of content storage in general. If you're in a business where part of your requirements is to pump content out to the public at-large, then open HTML begins looking like the best solution. As it is now, one-click exporting from print documents into an easy to publish HTML format is still a bit of a dream for most DTP apps (though, admittedly, a big part of that is simply lack of application user training/knowledge).

As for calling these gentlemen out for a lack of type knowledge, I think that's valid...they are clearly more technology orientated and seem to be focused on a lot of university and scientific documentation (which is the origins of the web). But I don't think that invalidated their vision...if anything, it should be a call to arms to help them improve the product based on the needs of the professional typesetter/designer.

"Still lingering or malingering does go on. Vinyl sales are up in a big way...."

This is maybe for an entirely different thread, but I find that point very interesting. Why is that? Clearly, part of that is the fact that it's a tangible item. Perhaps that's the appeal of Prince for some? It turns the intangible screen of HTML into a tangible book?

"Vinyl sales are up in a big way...."

"Perhaps that’s the appeal of Prince for some?"

Prince was always better on vinyl, purple vinyl in particular.

"Prince was always better on vinyl, purple vinyl in particular."

Ha! Purple Rain was the first LP I ever owned. (I'm not sure if I'm proud or embarrassed of that fact...)

I think the idea of separating content from presentation is very useful and has a huge potential for making information more accessible, but it's not always easy to draw the line between the two...

@Thomas: You are completely wrong there. Håkon Lie seriously claims that such free fonts are “good enough” for general use, and has been working very hard to prevent the adoption of any web font scheme that would work with retail/commercial fonts.

Thanks I didn't know that. I know Ray Larabie's fonts rather well. His free products have no serious problems. But surely there's a taste issue here. Ray's old Larabiefonts catalog is permanently "set" in the late 1990's/2000 era geist. Dieter Steffmann's blackletters I love but have never seen under the hood, and again there is a style issue.

Also, by "popular angle" I was thinking of Manfred Klein's mysterious output, confusing him with Steffmann for a moment.

@Thomas: I’m a bit bemused by folks putting down Adobe-promoted standards relating to typography. I take it PostScript, Type 1 and now OpenType have not solved real problems and you didn’t like them?

I like what Adobe has given us and embrace it whole-heartedly. OpenType allows me to realize some fantastic creative ideas.

W3C's concept of typography and typesetting I find compromised. Its lack of versatility and precision is offputting.

j a m e s

@James: No offense intended to either you or Ray, but I might disagree with you on the quality of his fonts as well. I guess it depends on what you mean by "no serious problems." For my own needs and how I evaluate fonts, >95% of the time I'm holding it to a pretty high standard, and price is only a secondary consideration for me.

I also assume that Ray is making a tradeoff between the quality of his fonts and the quantity/variety they produce (or the time he puts in per font, if you want to look at it that way).

Type designers in general are free to choose something other than the extreme "quality" end of that spectrum. Personally, I'm more interested in typeface quality than quantity, and that's what I'd like to see more of in the world as a whole.

This is all a bit of a diversion from the main topic. i think that the general idea that more and more content is going to be primarily Web based is true. The video in question sensationalizes it a bit, and there are questions about the speed of content migration to the Web. But the general idea is indisputable. I don't think that means either print or InDesign will go away any time soon, though.

Cheers,

T

Thomas, no offense taken. I only meant no serious technical problems in Larabiefonts. Aesthetics and typeface design is of course another matter.
I would love to see Ray make fewer fonts of more artful design, but what Ray does is what Ray does (Ray is as Ray does) and it isn't really my job to decide major content issues for him. I'm more a tweaker of his work and a coach, and a partner he bounces ideas off. He does the same for me.

I also assume that Ray is making a tradeoff between the quality of his fonts and the quantity/variety they produce (or the time he puts in per font, if you want to look at it that way).

There is a tradeoff in the amount of time put into each font in order to maintain the level of quantity Ray turns out. But again it's a matter of what Ray does being what Ray does. It's a question of momentum and keeping the momentum going. He needs to because that's his nature. It has everything to do with continuous creative activity and very little to do with compromising quality in any sense.

The video in question sensationalizes it a bit...

Yes, that's what I was getting at with, "hedging for a poular angle". It's not over until the obese lady sings.

Back on topic...

j a m e s

@Aluminum
If anything, and if the moons align, we might see InDesign eventually just use CSS natively within the application.

THAT's what I'm waiting for. An ideal program would be a combination of Dreamweaver and InDesign, able to organize and simplify stylesheets for complex typography ALA InDesign, but output well-specified valid XHTML + CSS.

That's the day that I am happy, where I can spend my time on the visual end of design, rather than on wondering why the padding on this or that DIV is bumping this column over and breaking under IE.

"That’s the day that I am happy, where I can spend my time on the visual end of design, rather than on wondering why the padding on this or that DIV is bumping this column over and breaking under IE."

Alas, InDesign supporting valid XHTML and CSS won't fix the issues with a particular browser.

The reason css isn't 'precise' is that it'd not designed to be. HTML + CSS is how one typically 'suggests' a visual presentation to the end user. It doesn't dictate it.

The appeal of an app like Prince or a CSS-enabled InDesign is that it would allow you to dictate a layout for that one particular medium...in this case, a PDF. You'd still have valid CSS and HTML that may or may not render exactly as you want in any one particular web browser, but at least you'd have the full control over the PDF you are creating. The valid and portable and semantic HTML+CSS is then just a bonus that makes it easy to slap onto the web.

"CSS and HTML that may or may not render exactly as you want in any one particular web browser, but at least you’d have the full control over the PDF you are creating."

Then why not use InDesign in the first place? :-o There are several other amuzing things about this thread.

"I take it PostScript, Type 1 and now OpenType have not solved real problems and you didn’t like them?"

Thomas, choice in any of the three was not an issue, so WE LOVE 'EM, LOVE 'EM & LOVE 'EM! Do these 'standards' have the guts, balls and smarts to take on the dynamic networked low res typographic requirements of the planet? apparently not. No font format could, that window is now closed. Please proceed to the next window.

"Technologies tend to coexist more often then they throttle each other to death."

Mmmm, this may be true, more elsewhere than in software. One could make a strong case that the T1 and TT technologies throttled each other to death, in the bleak and blurry view of the web honchos at least.

Then of course, what columns fill up with is far more important than the columns themselves. I mean...have shorter and/or justified lines of text ever made it easier to compose badly designed and/or poorly rendered type into 'good typography'? We've all seen fixed columns s'plode on impact when users have the audacity to pick their own type size.

Cheers!

Håkon Lie seriously claims that such free fonts are “good enough” for general use, and has been working very hard to prevent the adoption of any web font scheme that would work with retail/commercial fonts.

That demonstrates how ignorant of typography and good typographic design this original author of the CSS spec, Lie, really is. What an impractical, anti-commercial agenda! Does he, or has he ever, worked as a designer for commerce, doing commercial design for money? Does he understand what drives professionalism and high standards in any design industry? Commercial design is about more than money, its about doing a good job and delivering value for the client's money. The CSS spec makes delivering high quality typesetting impractical. Stop wasting my time.

Shutting out retail/commercial fonts from adoption by any web font scheme is paranoid, nonsensical, unworkable. Come down out of your ivory tower, Håkon Lie. Throw away your bleeding heart prejudices and look at type from the standpoint of quality and the needs of professional users for quality fonts in web-based publishing. You want everybody to adopt your standards, yet you ply them with contempt and mistrust for the makers of high quality fonts.

j a m e s

When I was talking about one thing killing another or not I was thinking of how old computer languages still exist and are quite alive because banks are still using & editing code that was written in the 60's. It's a minor % of the code that's written each year and yet it isn't dead.

However David; your point about context/specificity determining the outcome is a hell of a good one. What may be true for say computer languages which rise & fall quickly but may harbor holdouts, may not be true for how documents are stored, or how bread is made or what happens to ID/text layout.

Being slightly contrary I keep thinking of "Micro brew" beer and how it has not only not been wiped out, but seems to be rising each year at the expense of mass market sudz.

"That demonstrates how ignorant of typography and good typographic design this original author of the CSS spec, Lie, really is."

Does it? The CSS spec really has no care/interest in where a font comes from or the particular license it has. It's not biased one way or the other.

"The CSS spec makes delivering high quality typesetting impractical. Stop wasting my time."

Are we talking about the CSS specification or Prince? The point of Prince is to make CSS practical for print based typesetting.

"Shutting out retail/commercial fonts from adoption by any web font scheme is paranoid, nonsensical, unworkable."

And unless I missed something, nothing to do with CSS. CSS doesn't shut any particular font out.

Now if we're talking about things like font embedding, well, isn't that the idea of the PDF output? Let the PDF take care of that portion.

"It’s a minor % of the code that’s written each year and yet it isn’t dead."

I think we'd be surprised at how much code IS 'legacy' code each year. I had to use up a $50 Circuit City gift certificate yesterday. I was smiling at the fact that their check-out terminal, which is right next to the latest PCs with Vista, Wiis, and all sorts of other 'modern' technology was running a DOS-like terminal application that I'm sure has code circa 1980 in it still ;o)

Anyways, I don't think Prince has anything to do with 'the end of print'. It's specifically designed FOR print.

Darrel, I was talking about what Thomas Phinney said: Håkon Lie seriously claims that such free fonts are “good enough” for general use, and has been working very hard to prevent the adoption of any web font scheme that would work with retail/commercial fonts.

I was berating the author of CSS, not CSS itself.

Are we talking about the CSS specification or Prince? The point of Prince is to make CSS practical for print based typesetting.

The CSS spec. At worst I'm guilty of topic drift.

And unless I missed something, nothing to do with CSS. CSS doesn’t shut any particular font out.

You missed something. Either that or you're going out of your way to win points. I never claimed CSS shuts out particular kinds of fonts. Only that Lie's efforts with font embedding does.

I was criticizing Lie, not Prince.

j a m e s

CSS is hopelessly inadequate as a set of style rules for professional typesetting. I’m not going to bother digging through the CSS3 Text Module, next to none of which is actually supported anyway, but I assure you I cannot specify that a certain paragraph have a certain letterspacing, use only proportional lining figures, use all small caps (sic), and be followed by one specified other paragraph style that uses only a certain subset of available contextual alternates. CSS cannot even look inside OpenType fonts for specific features (though browsers can and do, often outside of anyone’s control – Zapfino displays with more and more ligatures with each browser rev).

Even adequately specifying the name of a font is difficult in CSS. (Try specifying exactly one variant of Thesis so it works in more than one non-braindead browser.) There’s the additional complication that print CSS cannot even reliably get the pt unit right across browsers and platforms.

Many brute measurements, like offsets and indents, can be specified in CSS, but we need more than brute force, we need finesse.

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

James...thanks for the clarification. No worries on topic drift...I think I'm as guilty as anyone...

joe...your gripes are perfectly valid in the context of most web browsers out there. CSS isn't necessarily the issue, but the fact that most CSS support in browsers is partial, or just plain wrong.

So, I guess I'm saying that the gripe most of us have isn't necessarily with the spec, but the lack of support for said spec in most CSS rendering agents. That's where Prince starts to appeal to me (in theory, at least) as it DOES seem to support the CSS spec to a much greater extent.

P.S. any interest in inviting Day and Lie into the conversation?

I agree emphatically with Joe that referencing fonts in CSS is fundamentally broken. It's an even bigger problem because a lot of apps and other "things" out there want to "use" CSS as part of their text model, and when they try to deal with how one specifies a specific font, they have to deal with the fact that what constitutes a font "family" is fundamentally ambiguous and under-specified in CSS.

Each implementer usually ends up coming with their own, incompatible notion of how the CSS spec maps fonts and families to *actual specific fonts* and the end result is not pretty. I've seen many software dev teams hit this issue over the years, especially recently.

You know it's a problem when somebody has to write an 18-page spec on how to get from actual fonts to CSS font families and individual fonts.

That being said, I'm not convinced there is any fundamental barrier to doing pretty good typography in CSS some day. It will probably need some extensions to CSS, whether that's CSS 4 (or later) or something more proprietary.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss the entire concept just because the current implementation is limited. Metal typesetters made fun of phototype at first, and phototypesetters thought digital type was much too limited... but each technology evolved, and even the initial implementations often had compelling advantages that gained them many early converts. So it is with CSS based typography, I think.

Cheers,

T

Pardon me, gents, for my sour grapes performance. CSS isn't all bad. The W3C spec has its flaws and limitations, however, compliance is more problematic.

I agree with Thomas that it's too easy to dismiss embryonic technologies. Darrel's suggestion of inviting Day and Lie into the conversation has a lot to recommend it. A fresh thread would help. I'll apologize to Prince's authors in advance---if you gentlemen would like to come here we can talk in a more civilized manner.

j a m e s

I was impressed with the presentation. Forget Håkon Lie's bashing of InDesign and his rather naiive take on fonts. It seems that Prince is the brainchild of Michael Day, whom I instantly liked based on his balanced and toned down presentation style. He seems to be observant, respectful and willing to improve his product. Håkon's role in the company seems to be more of the networker and talking head -- a pity that he has so many qualities that split and ignite people.

Obviously, he has been looking at TeX when implementing Prince, and hopefully will continue to. TeX is one of the best automated typesetting systems out there, when it comes to text composition (I think only Adobe's current InDesign text engine can match it). But IMO, it is hopelessly obsolete when it comes to the input -- the language is insular and rather awkward to learn. It is clear that 15 years ago, it was the reference model for text layout -- after all, RTF was derived from the TeX notation. But today, the SGML-HTML-XML markup paradigm has clearly won.

I think the war "against" CSS is lost -- it is my firm belief that the typographic community has to accept, embrce and then try to extend it. We should learn to talk to people such as Håkon Lie, form a coalition of people interested in quality text composition and promote our ideas among the web people.

In fact, unlike Håkon Lie, many of the "web people" do appreciate the 500-year old legacy of traditional printing, with all its legibility optimization process. If the web wants to become the new book, it needs to learn from the vast knowledge amassed within the school of old book. It is quite obvious that web developers and also browser developers typically come from a different angle -- so now is the time to educate them about the reasons why typography is not just for people who deal with lead.

I do have some ideas in the works :)

A.

Thanks for bringing your practical and well-informed perspective to the table Adam.

Forget Håkon Lie’s bashing of InDesign and his inadequate fonts. He seems to be a person who heats up quickly and is loudly outspoken but somewhat seems to lack respect for other people’s work and opinions. But his role at Prince seems to be more of the networker and talking head.

Got it. I do not particularly enjoy to overreacting to Lie---being told this makes it easier. At the same time I'm not into judging the character of people thousands of miles from me who I have never met. He does however, appear outspoken, and that is a factor he and others will have to refactor to get things moving.

...Prince is clearly the brainchild of Michael Day, whom I instantly liked based on his balanced and toned down presentation style. He seems to be observant, respectful and willing to improve his product.

Good. This is what we need.

I think the war “against” CSS is lost — it is my firm belief that the typographic community has to accept, embrce and then try to extend it.

I am willing to accept it and get behind it if it can be improved and made to serve the needs of professional publishers.

We should learn to talk to people such as Håkon Lie, form a coalition of people interested in quality text composition and promote our ideas among the web people.

If Håkon Lie can learn to appreciate what type designers and commercial publishers do, you got a deal. He is most welcome here. We are more than capable of making the effort to accomodate him and his colleagues, provided such collaboration is mutual. Keep it civil people. James P. mind your language.

In fact, unlike Håkon Lie, many of the “web people” do appreciate the 500-year old legacy of traditional printing, with all its legibility optimization process. If the web wants to become the new book, it needs to learn from the vast knowledge amassed within the school of old book. It is quite obvious that web developers and also browser developers typically come from a different angle — so now is the time to educate them about the reasons why typography is not just for people who deal with lead.

Alright. Let's do it. Make it happen. I'm with you all the way Adam (weather permitting).

j a m e s

Hello all,

To jump into the conversation, I would like to say that in my personal opinion the web has been a giant leap forwards for worldwide information distribution, and a giant leap backwards for high-quality typography and typesetting. However, we believe that it's possible to do something about the latter, and Prince is the result of our efforts to make printing a first-class citizen of the web.

We still have a long way to go, and as was mentioned in the Tech Talk we have only just begun to scratch the surface when it comes to hyphenation, OpenType features and other fun stuff. However, we're always interested in hearing new feature requests. Further up the thread someone mentioned that it is impossible to apply certain OpenType features with CSS, this is something that we would like to support in Prince, so that decorative swashes or old-style numerals could be selected using the font-variant property (which currently only supports small-caps) or some other mechanism.

There is also the question of fonts on the web, but this seems to rouse strong feelings on both sides and should perhaps be sequestered in a thread of its own :)

Best regards,

Michael

Hello Michael,

I like the concept of Prince. I'll keep an eye on how it develops.

I'm not too familiar with the motive for making the web a better WYSIWYG platform, so I'd like to hear more on that.

Cheers!

Mike:

Thanks for stopping by! Your comments are appreciated. Please, stick around!

"I’m not too familiar with the motive for making the web a better WYSIWYG platform, so I’d like to hear more on that."

Not quite sure what part of the conversation you are referring to, but in the context of Prince, from my perspective, it's not about WYSIWYGifying the web, but rather leveraging the ability of CSS for print, which, up to this point, hasn't been supported by any application to an extent that would even make it remotely feasible for print publishing.

I came from a layout (WYSIWYG) platform - cut and paste - so the transition to digital using Quark and later InDesign was pretty intuitive. But I can't even manage to remember how to insert a link into a typophile post, so a code-based layout program doesn't sound very appealing to me. My limited web expertise is Dreamweaver which has suited me just fine, but I recognize its limitations in terms of code. For someone whose orientation is web (or code) based, adapting CSS to print (if this becomes possible) would seem like a natural step.

I'll just sit here using my layout programs and wait for the web to catch up in terms of precision and quality. I'm certainly not going to learn a confusing new app (CSS) until that happens.

"so a code-based layout program doesn’t sound very appealing to me"

But surely you've used styles within XPress and Indesign, right? CSS really isn't that far removed from that...at least conceptually. Granted, the UI to manipulate said styles might not be up to par yet.

I definitely use styles, but even then it's point and click. I don't know CSS at all, but what I've seen of html I know it's way over my head. It reminds me of the old PC days - wordperfect and such. But CSS could be different and if I'm wrong I apologize. I don't have an hour to watch that video and find out. I can get as far as making text italic and bold in html but that's about all I can manage.

CSS would be really easy to understand if we were coding for standards compliant browsers, because it's all supposedly based on a box model that we as designers can understand. The same as a text or photo box in InDesign, with stylesheets on the side determining margins and text and stuff.

You want three boxes. You want this box here, this box here, and this box here. I want one 12pt em space separating them all. I want the text to be like so in this box, and like so in the other two. And I want a photo with a keyline with a 12pt em space around it in one of the boxes.

Sounds easy, right? The actual CSS for that is incredibly easy. The big problem is that none of the browsers will read your spacing requirements the same. Safari/FF/IE will all space things differently, and your layout WILL BREAK if designed according to proper specifications.

What looks cool about Prince is that it will simply do what you wanted it to do to begin with, according to your valid HTML and CSS.

If you're going to give us specifications, you have to honor those specifications. If not, what's the whole point?

“I’m not too familiar with the motive for making the web a better WYSIWYG platform, so I’d like to hear more on that.”

That was a rhetorical statement, right? or Sarcasm?

CSS manifestly is the issue.

DanGayle, your three-“box” layout will break in IE6, not in non-braindead browsers. You can take care of IE using conditional comments, which will leave you feeling only moderately impure.

Patty, you have probably been looking at tag-soup HTML. I assure you that standards-compliant HTML is a concept that can be learned in eight minutes flat and is easy as pie to do. If blind teenagers can learn it (after deprogramming them from tag-soup methods), you can, too. Some unusually complex documents require unusual semantics, but really, most Web sites are headings, paragraphs, lists, images, and forms, all but the last of which are dead simple.

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

The biggest jump that a print designer has to make in designing for the web is that there is no page. When you design anything for print, one of the first things you determine is "how big is the page" that it will be printed on.

On the web, you never know. The person might be viewing at 640x400 resolution, or it might be even larger than 1280x920, or something else. Some pages are even accessible from cell phones. It creates an entirely new paradigm for the designer to deal with. You can't be content with making a page look pretty on your monitor, it has to be useful on all monitors.

(And that isn't even getting into the problems with color.)

The person might be viewing

You even can’t be sure about that; CSS is not limited to visual media. One can also define aural stylesheets with it. (Admittedly, this has nothing to do with Prince.)

As a totally rad sidenote, did anyone notice the little bit of Javascript now available from Google?

Quote:
IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6. Endquote.

The cool part is that you can hotlink it straight from Google's page. What this means is that all of a sudden, you as a designer might be able to FORCE IE into be a standards compliant browser. (Mostly.) Take a look at this page to see all of the fixes.

Happy Dance!

Thanks for the link Dan :^) Very useful.

j a m e s

Dan...that is interesting. I had forgotten about that nifty script. Looks like he's made a major update to it.

Getting off the subject a little, but related to above -- I only recently came to understand that some of the cross-browser issues I'd seen were not bugs but just differences in browsers' inbuilt default styles.

Unless you've defined every property of every element some of the default styles will be inherited - eg (something I'd overlooked) line-height.

A "reset" style sheet can help by providing a consistent unstyled baseline for each element.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/

Here's an example of resetting and then providing a very basic styled baseline

http://www.monc.se/tripoli/

Thanks for inviting me in. I see that my tounge-in-cheek remarks about InDesign users in the corner has caused some remarks. I think InDesign will live a long and happy life, but I do believe the web will live even longer. Including CSS. Which is why it's important that it works well for all sorts of uses.

I proposed CSS in 1994 and it's been an important part of my life since then. My motivation for doing this work is twofold. First, it's important that the markup languages of the web are spared from holding all the typographic and presentational information that we want to associate with documents. Second, we need ways to express beautiful typography and design for web documents.

I have described CSS and compared it with other style sheet languages in my PhD Thesis:

http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/

So far, I think CSS has been reasonably successful in establishing a baseline foundatation for style sheets on the web, and -- by now -- all browsers supports CSS1 reasonably well. It's also clear that much work remains in advancing the specifications further, and to ensure that they are interoperably implemented by browsers and other formatters (e.g., Prince). I think the Typofile community can play an important role here.

One of the things I have been pushing in the last year is web fonts. The web is stuck with 10 or so fonts that Microsoft published in 1996. They have served us well, but we need more fonts in order to improve typography on the web. There are thousands of freely usable fonts on the web but there is a missing link; browsers don't support the linking of fonts from style sheets to font files. I'm trying to change this; I want browsers to support the CSS2 specification from 1996 which described how to do this.

http://www.news.com/Microsofts-forgotten-monopoly/2010-1032_3-6085417.html
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten

Prince now supports Web Fonts, as does nightly builds of Safari. We're working on it in Opera, too.

A common argument against webfonts is that not all TrueType files out there are good enough for web use. They may have limited unicode coverage, lack ligatures or simply look horrific. Some people have commisioned studies that say only a fraction of the fonts are suitable for web use!

I think that's great news! 5% of thousands is still plenty of new fonts. As support for webfonts increase, I think web designers will start using them in creative ways which will result in more fonts being developed, with wider unicode coverage etc. The tide will rise for all of us.

Some of you may worry that webfonts is threat to your existing business models and that font piracy will increase when everyone can point to a font file on the web. While it's true that linking is very powerful, there are also ways to restrict it. For example, a web server can check the 'Referer' field in HTTP and only serve fonts to those requests coming from a sanctioned list of documents. This is not a failsafe method -- it's probably as easy to crack as the EOT obfuscation -- but it will stop much abuse.

On a more technical topic, I'm working on extending the 'font-variant' propoerty in CSS to better select fonts with OpenType features. Would this be of interest in this forum?

http://people.opera.com/howcome/

Welcome to Typophile :)

So you, uh, invented CSS huh? Cool. Not quite Tim Berners-Lee, but still cool.

I think one problem that you'll run into when discussing web fonts is that your 5% "good enough for web use" free fonts is in most Typophile's estimates, 4.9% too high. (No offense James or Nick and Co.)

Granted, there are some fonts available out there that are of excellent quality with an open license like the Vera fonts, Charter, etc., but I for one do not want to see a worldwide web populated with the likes of Black Chancery or any of the 2002 Honest Fonts.

Inevitably, someone will put commercial fonts on a server in Russia, and allow people to hotlink off of it. While Adobe, or certainly Berthold, would love to go hunting with cease and desist orders, the hard-working men and women of this website simply don't have the financial backing to go hunting after every single abuse. It's just not reasonable.

> Inevitably, someone will put commercial fonts on a server
> in Russia, and allow people to hotlink off of it.

You can think of it this way:

People have always distributed commercial fonts illegally. Will font embedding change that, principally? Not really. However, the fonts that will be linked against web pages will be much easier to discover than the illegally distributed archives that are RARed, ZIPped, password protected and uploaded on rapidshare.com or something like that. And, sure, there will be some additional piracy going on, but there will be also a chance to obtain additional license fees from legitimate customers who will WANT to embed their fonts into wed pages using the direct linking mechanism. A font foundry will have a good argument to charge additional money for that type of license -- the foundry can argument that, indeed, the font files are being made accessible to the public without any protection, so the customer has to pay considerably more.

In my opinion, the pirates wouldn't have paid anyway, so the loss is only theoretical, while the potential gain is actual since there are real money-making possibilities due to additional licensing sales. OpenType was one chance to cash in on potential font upgrades to clients who had happily used their Type 1 fonts before that. The Euro character also such a chance. Web font embedding will be another.

Regards,
Adam

Håkon - I'm so pleased to see you've made it to this forum. I commend your work on CSS and bringing typographic control to the web. What seems missing in your efforts (which I believe are laudable and sincere) is the advice of professional typographers. You need the consultation of people who are not necessarily web designers, but experts in readability, type selection, and typesetting fundamentals. Opening your door to Typophile, which is full of such experts, is a great first step.

Welcome to the Typophile forums Håkon Lie. We are most keen to have you here and very keen to discuss the future of CSS and embedded web fonts. Thank you for coming along :^)

And, sure, there will be some additional piracy going on, but there will be also a chance to obtain additional license fees from legitimate customers who will WANT to embed their fonts into wed pages using the direct linking mechanism. A font foundry will have a good argument to charge additional money for that type of license — the foundry can argument that, indeed, the font files are being made accessible to the public without any protection, so the customer has to pay considerably more.

That sounds okay in theory. In practice, how much extra in the way of additional licensing fees will font makers or vendors deem such usage to be worth, and will customers be willing to pay that amount for using a font on a webpage?

Off the top of my head, I imagine I would be charging between $500 and $1000 U.S, possibly a good deal more, for this kind of licensing, depending on the font. And I'm only a smallfry independent font maker. How much would a large 'foundry' charge? Some of them put up to a million dollars into the development of one font (or a font family, say). If only two license sales are possible for web use, the fee will be hefty.

In my opinion, the pirates wouldn’t have paid anyway, so the loss is only theoretical, while the potential gain is actual since there are real money-making possibilities due to additional licensing sales.

The potential gain in large one-off license sales for web use I can see, but font makers who put their wares up for this arrangement can virtually kiss future retail license sales of their commercial font products goodbye once those fonts become widely distributed for free courtesy of the server somewhere in Russia syndrome.

I think one problem that you’ll run into when discussing web fonts is that your 5% “good enough for web use” free fonts is in most Typophile’s estimates, 4.9% too high. (No offense James or Nick and Co.)

No problem Dan. I agree with your estimate. 5% is 4.9% too high.

...the hard-working men and women of this website simply don’t have the financial backing to go hunting after every single abuse. It’s just not reasonable.

This is true. I don't have the resources required to deal with piracy on such a scale, neither does Nick Curtis, or Ray Larabie, or anyone else we consider independent.

j a m e s

> will customers be willing to pay that amount for using a font on a webpage?

Sure thing. When developing websites, people pay for hosting services, web development, design, photos. And people who make print publications regularly pay for fonts. I think companies will be delighted to pay for font web use if this will allow them to break free from the Verdana-Georgia-Arial closet.

> can virtually kiss future retail license sales of their commercial font
> products goodbye once those fonts become widely distributed for free
> courtesy of the server somewhere in Russia syndrome.

Virtually ALL commercial fonts ARE already in distribution "for free courtesy of the server somewhere in Russia syndrome", and have been FOR YEARS -- just like software from Microsoft, Adobe, FontLab etc. -- on Usenet, rapidshare, various forums, BitTorrent etc. etc. etc.

I have not seen font distributors or software distributors "kissing goodbye retail sales" in the past years. Plus, as I said -- unlike illegitimate use in print, which is difficult to track down, illegal use of fonts that will be linked directly to web pages will be the easiest thing to discover. After all, that use will be indexed by Google and stored pretty much forever at archive.org.

The fact that I put up an image or a font on my site and use it with my content does not mean that that image or font is "available for free". Everyone knows that they cannot freely use any stuff just because they were able to download it from "the internets" -- including software, graphics, and now fonts. Most people are very aware of what piracy is, and know at least the fundamental difference between legitimate and illegitimate use of software assets. If font distributors make it easy enough for people to pay for those assets and use them the way they wish, people WILL pay.

Why am I sure? Because that's what they're already doing. It is already easy to download pirated fonts from a number of sources, and it is quite possible to extract font outlines from PDF documents, Flash files, Word documents. And? People are still paying for fonts. Chris, kids have been paying for mobile phone ringtones and icons, and that business is worth millions.

Pirates can rub their butts sore uploading fonts to Russian servers all day long -- yet only a considerably small proportion of users will link to those and use them. And those users wouldn't probably pay anyway. But once this thing sets off, the people who HAVE THE MONEY and are willing to pay WILL PAY.

Facebook has over 50 million users, MySpace is rumored to have twice as many. I dare to say that no less than 5% of those would be willing to pay a small amount of money (like $10) for the ability to customize their profile appearance using a different font. It's a fraction of what people spend on buying silly t-shirts.

A.

> I don’t have the resources required to deal with piracy on such a scale,
> neither does Nick Curtis, or Ray Larabie, or anyone else we consider independent.

True. This is why you should forget about hunting pirates, come up with a new licensing model that would cover web font embedding, and wait for the sound of the nickel. Or of the cash register desk, if that's your preferred metaphor.

A.

So, the vendors need to change their EULAs to allow this... I think the chances are zero to slim.

My observation has been that they've been going in the opposite direction in recent years, restricting what you can do with the PDF, banning WEFT, outlawing Flash, mostly in response to fears of unauthorized use/extraction.

Cheers, Si

My EULA will prohibit screen rendering. In fact, it already does.

Presenting my new font, DanSans:

I vote that Adobe be the first to allow this usage. They won't be though. It will probably be a Roger Black-led re-design of some magazine or newspaper's website using a proprietary Font Bureau salvaging of an obscure Benton typeface from the early 20th century.

Money? Anyone care for odds?

>My EULA will prohibit screen rendering. In fact, it already does.

You joke Dan, but I'd wager that I can find a font EULA that not only prohibits screen display but also printing ;-)

Adam, I understand the rationale of the scenario you propose---there is a lot to be said for positive thinking on this issue, as font makers and those selling licences can do a lot worse than changing their license terms and conditions to suit a new business model, like not changing it or making it more restrictive.

Nonetheless, I think the new situation is not as simple as proponents make it out to be. We need more input on this from larger font makers and vendors. My perspective is of limited scope. It has been a while since I monitored font piracy, so the current extent of it is unfamiliar.

@Adam: This is why you should forget about hunting pirates, come up with a new licensing model that would cover web font embedding, and wait for the sound of the nickel. Or of the cash register desk, if that’s your preferred metaphor.

I'm willing to give it a trial to see how it works. I can afford to because the stakes aren't as high for me as they would be for a large outfit that invests a great deal more labor in their products.

@Sii: So, the vendors need to change their EULAs to allow this... I think the chances are zero to slim.

My observation has been that they’ve been going in the opposite direction in recent years, restricting what you can do with the PDF, banning WEFT, outlawing Flash, mostly in response to fears of unauthorized use/extraction.

@DanGale: My EULA will prohibit screen rendering. In fact, it already does.

Well, there you go. That's the reation. I appreciate why it's going that way. It seems there is a degree of paranoia involved, fueling the ever-more-restrictive EULA. I have resisted the trend for years and have no plans to make my EULAs more restrictive.

Dan, if your proposed EULA prohibits screen rendering, does that mean vendors will not be permitted to show potential buyers what your font(s) look like? If so, selling any retail licenses at all will be rather difficult.

The answer is to trust everyone, but cut the cards. In other words, at a minimum you should trust vendors and media buyers to render and assess your fonts online, but if they abuse your trust, then do something about it.

j a m e s

@James
'Twas a joke, kind sir.

@Adam
I like your approach. Instead of worrying about what kind of money a foundry might be losing via pirates, a foundry might instead start worrying about what profit making opportunities they might be missing out on.

I like the ringtone analogy, but it might fit the big boys better than the small foundries. The record labels are sitting on old music that isn't going anywhere. There's no cost to sell an Eagles tune, since all of the production and expenses were paid back in the 70s. Now all they have to do is sell the crap out of it, and it's pure gold.

Same with Mono/Lino, etc. They have all of these typefaces that have already been designed and digitized sitting around in digital dustbins, so why not push them out there and make more profit off of it if someone is willing to pay?

Dan, that's cool.

...if someone is willing to pay?

Yep. I don't mind as long as  s o m e b o d y  is paying.

Let's say I release a font with provisions in the EULA that allow embedding on webpages, and charge $500 for one customer's use of the font on a website (multiple webpages). If the font file the customer installs on their server is not protected (how else can users viewing the web page see the font in their browsers?), dozens if not hundreds of enterprising clever dicks will make copies of the font file and distribute it without authorization. The next potential customer who wants to use my font on a webpage is not likely to shell out any money at all for a license fee if my font becomes freely distributed, when they can link to an unorthorized copy for zero cost. I'm talking about  w i d e l y  d i s t r i b u t e d, actual font files. Extracting outlines from PDFs doesn't have the same impact that distribution of the font file does.

j a m e s

Wow dude, you must be out of the loop something fierce. I, and anyone else, can have all of the major foundries folios in a hop, skip, and a jump via the methods described above by Adam. The facts are simple, if I want your font for free, I can get it.

Illegally, but I can get it.

What Adam is saying is that if someone is going to steal their font, that person is likely to have already done so. What the foundries are depending upon is the solitary, sometimes institutionalized, consciences of individuals and companies determined to do the right thing. (Or at least, the legal thing.)