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ABOUT

EOTFAST [Richard Fink]

Free software sponsored by Readable Web (Richard Fink) for transforming truetype files into EOT files. He explains the history of this product here in October 2015:

Not so long ago, I had a great desire to create a new tool for fonts using, as a basis, proprietary software from Monotype. I needed a way to make compressed EOT files using Monotype's proprietary MicroType Express (MTX) technology. The tool that Microsoft was offering for the purpose, named WEFT, was a piece of abandonware, unworkable in a production environment. And Microsoft seemed totally uninterested in making better tools whether or not EOT was adopted as the standard webfont format or not. The ball was in Monotype's court. Being able to make an EOT in a production environment was critical: In an amazing stroke of luck - or visionary product design, take your pick - Internet Explorer had supported webfonts via EOT for many years. And that meant in only a few years, webfonts could become ubiquitous because displaying webfonts on legacy versions of IE was simply a matter of providing the font as an EOT. However, if EOT's could NOT be produced because of legal restrictions, well, then typography would be held back on the web for years and years as designers waited for the versions of IE that did not support WOFF (or raw TTF or OTF fonts) to fall off the radar as their user base approached zero. At the time, everyone involved in the negotiations at the W3C - negotiations which ultimately ended up crowning WOFF as the standard format for webfonts - everyone involved assumed that Monotype held all the legal cards because of Monotype's patent on the method for making EOTs. And that without licensing from Monotype - which Monotype could refuse - webfonts that worked with legacy versions of Internet Explorer was simply not a practical proposition. Such a situation would, unfortunately, set "fonts on the web" back years and years because without a practical tool for creating EOT's you couldn't deliver the font to any of the legacy versions of Internet Explorer. In the world of patents and copyright, things are often not as simple as they seem - a fact which works to the supposed rights-holders advantage every time. I remember talking to Dave C. about it at the LA Typecon some years ago. As I was searching for ways around the patent restrictions. The practical effect of Monotype's patent on MTX and therefore EOT sent a chill wind through the proponents of open source. It gave Monotype a sword of Damocles which they promised to remove by taking MTX public domain, if EOT was chosen as the standard web font format. But it still smelled like an ultimatum, and I really, really don't like ultimatums. The prospect of waiting years more for fonts on the web was unacceptable. The solution I came up with was a Windows command-line executable called EOTFAST. It did indeed use the proprietary software mentioned above and I did not need a license from Monotype to do it. BTW: EOTFAST and is still up on the web courtesy of my own stubbornness and the indulgence of some web developer friends who host it at: http://eotfast.com/ I really should, and will, post EOTFAST and the underlying code on Github soon. (And hey, if you ever have trouble getting an EOT to work, the documentation there which outlines the quirky requirements a font needs in order to become an EOT is pretty good.) How was I able to do that? Simple - I did some homework. There is a principle in patent law called "patent exhaustion". What that means is that those who license their technology are not entitled to double dip. If a company that makes pencil sharpeners licenses a patent from another company to use their patented rotary wood sharpening blade system and incorporates it into their product, that company cannot then, in turn, ask you - as a customer who bought the pencil sharpener - to pay extra to license the blade system. It came with the initial purchase. The deal is done. Finished. As lawyer and legal scholar Douglas E. Phillips explains in his book, "The Software License Unveiled": Toyota holds more that 650 patents relating to hybrid technology, but driving a Prius does not require holding a license under even one of them. The reason no patent license is required to own and operate a Prius is that, for over 150 years the Supreme Court has applied the doctrine of patent exhaustion to limit the patent rights that survive the initial authorized sale of a patented item. The essence of the doctrine is that the authorized sale of an article that substantially embodies a patent exhausts the patent holder's rights and prevents the patent holder from invoking patent law to control post-sale use of the article. Therefore, having bought a Prius, the only license you need is a license to drive. Similarly, having bought and paid for a license for Windows, you're perfectly free to make use of the dlls that control the making of an EOT. No further license necessary. (I also found out that EOTs were not only supported by IE but Powerpoint and Word, as well.) The software necessary to create them was already in Windows. And as long as you did the work within the scope of your license for Windows, there wasn't a damn thing Monotype could do or say about it. They had exhausted their rights by licensing the technology to Microsoft. As a courtesy, I sent an email to Si Daniels and Microsoft's rep in the CSS fonts group, Sylvain Galineau, (working for Adobe, last we spoke) and I explained the situation and released the product. (For the record, it was the legal baggage related to how EOTs handled the embedding restrictions that made it unpalatable to the majority. The compromise of Woff gave the font producers their "garden fence" against unlicensed use without that baggage.) Now, to turn to matters of marketing : rather than just slap EOTFAST up on SourceForge or wherever, I decided to give it the patina of a "professionally" made product. I say "professionally" facetiously because it certainly was professionally done. I took a .com domain name for it. I gave it an icon. Good documentation was provided. It was all zipped up nice. I just don't know how to present a product any other way. Ok, so it's free. But you still gotta dress for success, it's a matter of pride. And that's the story of EOTFAST. Which I still use constantly today. A few years down the road, to their credit, Monotype did publish a universal release saying that anybody who wants to is free to use the MTX technology. And so it turns up here and there in non-Windows spaces like the Font Squirrel Generator, to name one.

EXTERNAL LINKS
EOTFAST
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INTERNAL LINKS
Web fonts ⦿