snip - Ultimately we hope that this proposal, or a modified version of it, will be endorsed by the W3C as the standard way to use fonts on the Web. Q What is being proposed to the World Wide Web Consortium?Ī Adobe and Microsoft together will submit a proposal for Web page font embedding using OpenType to the W3C's working group on style sheets. I have no idea if this is as properly standardized as TrueType, or if it's more like an "Microsoft extension" which could explain why Bitstream/Gnome didn't want to support it.
If that was the major reason for Adobe to support it, it looks more like MS did this "standard" on their own, hoping several others to license it and Adobe simply being an early adopter.
So this could've been a "standard" created by Microsoft and not surprisingly supported by Adobe for the reasons in the FAQ entry I quote above. In addition, because Adobe will license TrueType technology, it will now be able to develop and market TrueType fonts.
Q What does the OpenType initiative mean to Adobe's font business?Ī The OpenType initiative represents a new opportunity for Adobe to expand its font business into the Windows market because Type 1 fonts will now work out of the box on all Windows systems. I found this in the FAQ to look fishy in particular: This sounds good, but remember MS was part of the design group and this is MS pages. broader support for advanced typographic control smaller file sizes to make font distribution more efficient better support for international character sets
The OpenType format is an extension to TTF, adding support for PostScript font data and designed by Microsoft and Adobe with the following features: TrueType info, OpenType info, TrueType vs OpenType FAQ. Why no opentype? wasnt that meant to be the next big thing? This would at least solve the problems experienced by Opera and OpenOffice, for selecting sensible default fonts. Once we have that, we have default UTF-8 base fonts equal in strenght to Arial/Times New Roman/Courrier New, which any application can expect to find. Whether the Type1 URW fonts or these new Bitstream fonts should get that prestigious role remains an open issue, but in any case, the fonts should cover as much of UTF-8 as possible and at least all of the following: Arabic, CJK (simplified forms only), Cyrillic, Latin, Hellenic, Judaic. In any case, I think that, from now on, XFree86 should ship with only 3 fonts by default: serif, sans, mono - all in UTF-8.
Right now, the default Adobe fonts that ship with XFree86 are pretty crap! Granted the URW fonts released thru the Gimp site could be good as well and maybe should replace the tired old Adobe fonts. Cyrillic, Hellenic and missing Latin glyphs could be added? Then, we would really have a good starting point for what could become a GOOD default system font, not just in Gnome but in XFree86 too. Given that Gnome 2.2 uses UTF-8 by default, I wonder why these ISO-8859-1/9/15 fonts were not merged into a UTF-8 skeleton to which e.g. Since I can't change the web designing habits of people everywhere, I changed it back to Times New Roman. I moved the default font size down a bit, but then on other pages with relative font sizes everything was tiny. So, when changing out your Serif font to one that's larger, like this new Bitstream one, the pages using the browsers default font seem huge. Before CSS became widespread, TNR would default size="3", and Verdana would usually be set by a designer at size="2", or now with CSS some set Verdana at size=80%. So when using other fonts (Verdana, for example since it's very popular on the web), they size it down a bit so its comparable to TNR. Many web designers seem to do their work, font-size-wise, with the default size of Times New Roman as their basis. I tried using these fonts in Mozilla, but my problem with them is that the serif font is much larger than Times New Roman on my Windows machine (actually, my problem is that Times New Roman seems to be smaller than most other fonts).