Re: Are Downloadable Fonts better???

[John Dowdell]

At 11:48 AM 3/1/98, John Croteau wrote:

>I NEED HELP. Please give me ammunition so I can give a best response to

>Taylor, whose belief is that Downloadable fonts are now and Flash is not

>a viable solution. I think I have a good answer but want as many

>constructive suggests (Note constructive) so that I might polish my

>responce. This thread is on the new monkeyjunkies list.



I'm not sure of the context of the discussion, or what people actually

want, so it's hard to prescribe usefully. (As an aside, what's that list

like? Is it a useful conversation for advancing the art, or is it more like

the "Threads" section, or...?)



JC wrote:

> To get anti-aliased scalable text consider using Flash instead of

> limiting yourself to 4.x browsers with 2 different technologies for

> embedding fonts.


You hit on two of the big balance points there: downloadable fonts require

one of the two major browser brands, in one particular version, and

development costs require two separate font-downloading schemes. I've not

heard of any advances in the latter yet to reduce creation work, although

I'd have to believe that the two schemes would merge eventually.


Further, you also hit the prime point to "consider" an alternative. That's

great; there's no single solution that is perfect for every situation, and

so urging consideration of an option is the kindest thing that can be done.



Taylor apparently wrote:

>Not to start a religious war, but I don't think it's a good idea to make

>your text a binary executable.  I don't think it's a good idea to make

>your text an image either.  It removes the meaning from your page and

>prevents its from degrading, and from being indexed.


I don't think it's good to make text a binary executable either. I'm not

sure what was meant by the comment though. <g>  Perhaps it's a

misunderstanding of the Flash file format...?


fwiw, Flash is indeed similar in some ways to font-protection and

downloading schemes. From what I understand each letter that you use is

described once, and can then be repeatedly referenced (see Export Report

for details). The font is not available to other applications. A big

advantage, though, is that this is a single file that can be used in

plugins, controls, Java, or even image representation. It's also easy to

use.


I'm not sure of that "prevents it from degrading" comment... perhaps Taylor

is not yet familiar with Aftershock...?


It's true that content inside Flash cannot have a bulk word-search easily

applied to it. For some tasks for some people, that may be sufficient

tradeoff to choose the two font-downloading schemes.



>Downloadable fonts is a much better solution IMHO.


Opinions are sacrosanct. But when I say that sentence aloud to myself, I

hear that there's a phrase missing... "a better solution" for what?



Is this what you were looking for, John? Or...?


jd









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