Why Rent or Buy, When You Can Rasterize.

by huhtenberg • 17 years ago

12 25 17 years ago

huhtenberg• 17 years ago

Startup idea, anyone ?

poronski2• 17 years ago

The idea is OK, but one needs to have connections in typographic community to execute it. Going foundry by foundry and convincing them to take their heads out of DRM hole and consider simpler, unsexy options such as this one. This can translate into a lot of effort.

jrockway3• 17 years ago

If you are allowed to buy a font to make images for your website, why wouldn't you be allowed to sell those images to others? Professional web designers do it all the time.

(Video rentals are similar. First sale, and all that.)

oldgregg2• 17 years ago

Great concept, but who needs a service? This should just be an open source plugin. I dump all of my local fonts into a folder and then just <%= render_text "Hello World", :typeface => "Comic Sans", :height => "400" %> -- add a cache and this would be splendid.

PS. By "local fonts" I mean http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4475069/Font_Collection_(65_...

poronski2• 17 years ago

I wish I could downvote you for a sheer ignorance.

> who needs a service ?

Foundries do. You know, the people who actually make your "local fonts". Also those who recognize what a complex task the type design is and want to compensate them for their work.

oldgregg2• 17 years ago

Yeah, okay, well if you still cling to the antiquated concept of IP then I won't downvote you for sheer ignorance.

jhancock• 17 years ago

Its fine to compensate people for the tough work they do on fonts. It still doesn't mean you have to run it as a service. You can still license. Usually, most customers that will pay, do, without regard to what they can do illegally. Those that won't pay, probably won't pay for the service either.

audionerd• 17 years ago

re: "who needs a service": Jitterbug is an open source plugin that renders images of text suitable for image replacement:

  http://github.com/flyingsaucer/jitterbug

There have been solutions for PHP and others in the past, too. I think even a few hosted, though I can't recall any off the top.

ptomato3• 17 years ago

Really? Links to illegal copies? Classy.

jrockway3• 17 years ago

It's a link to the torrent of the illegal copy. The link does not lead to an illegal copy.

Also, is copying really illegal? What law and jurisdiction are you referring to?

sailormoon3• 17 years ago

I agree. And I'd further add that it's quite likely that the time wasted and inefficiencies caused by having to deal with the trifling issue of font IP handsomely exceeds the combined revenue of all font foundries on earth.

The top 500 or so fonts should just be moved into the public domain en masse so we can forget about this ridiculous issue once and for all. Sucks if you're a foundry but you don't get to collect windfall profits for the rest of your life just because you made a slightly more attractive capital A a few months before someone else would have done the same, and the cost of administrating that "property" far outweighs any benefit such a property regime might theoretically deliver.

mattdennewitz• 17 years ago

personally, i'll stay w/ typekit. the commenter (on typophile) who raised issue with images not being 100% accessible has a real point: now that i can use non-standard fonts in a standard way, ill take scalable text over an image.

niczar• 17 years ago

Stupid idea. That's what's already done today and it's not good enough: doesn't reflow, doesn't zoom properly, does not work for dynamic texts (eh buddy, ever heard of FUCKING BLOGS?), isn't that great for accessibility, SUCKS a lot for the mobile web, and so on and so forth. Why, oh why do I have to state the fucking obvious here?

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

Skip the profanity and you have a cogent argument in there somewhere.

domnit2• 17 years ago

> If you think for a moment how exactly non-standard fonts are used in the web design, it will immediately make perfect sense. They are used sparingly for headers, menus and such and they are always rasterized.

Non-standard fonts are used sparingly precisely because they have to be rasterized.

jhg• 17 years ago

You took it out of the context.

He is talking about the state of affairs and how that creates an immediate opportunity for type designers willing to sell rasterized versions of their fonts, not suggesting an alternative to the @font-face support.

domnit2• 17 years ago

> here is an idea that can be easily implemented right now and that will cover the 100% of the web design community needs.

jrockway3• 17 years ago

There seem to be a lot of complaints about the fact that images of text break accessibility. That is completely untrue, as long as the designer also includes alt text. I use a text-based web browser from time to time, and I've found that most designers do a good job of this.

This also doesn't break resizing any more than any other design element on the page would. Try going to any blog and resizing; the layout breaks. That's just how it goes if you want a page that looks nice. (Even HN doesn't resize nicely, and it doesn't use any images at all.)

So basically, this is a non-issue for 98% of the users. For the 1% of the users that use w3m without images enabled, they can still read all of the text. The 1% of users that are blind, can still have all the text read to them by the screen reader.

Sometimes I think people make these arguments because other people have made the same arguments for years. It's like a disease....

finnomenon• 17 years ago

is this what they are talking about? http://skrrl.org/font

Why Rent or Buy, When You Can Rasterize.

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