EOT versus OT, part II

TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:48:04 EDT 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE




EOT versus OT, part II [Written in September 2008.] EOT is the Embedded OpenType file format proposed by Adobe and Microsoft for embedding into web pages. OT is the well-known OpenType format. Adobe wants to convince font designers that it is safe to let people use EOT. But think about it---if EOT does a good job, then it must contain the same information as OT. In other words, from an information-theoretic viewpoint, they are equivalent. Just consider these scenarios. Scenario A: EOT becomes so convenient and successful that it actually deposes OT. Many applications, and printers, start accepting it as a font format. Oops, too late---the fonts are out. Scenario B: A clever hacker writes an EOT to OT converter, or, worse, a program that extracts all EOT fonts from a web page for conversion, or, worse still, a program that crawls the web pages on the internet for EOT files to convert. Triple oops. Now, as a type designer, before agreeing to release my fonts to the world in EOT form, I would like to hear what Adobe and Microsoft have to say about these two scenarios.	EXTERNAL LINKS MyFonts search Monotype search Fontspring search Google search INTERNAL LINKS Web fonts ⦿ David and Goliath ⦿

Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html