SVG fonts – open discussion
What are the implications of SVG for type vendors given the W3C standard and Adobe’s demonstrations of that technology
The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) meeting was scheduled before the main ATypI conference began, a last minute addition as a forum to address concerns about the standard that had recently come to light.
The aim was that Chris Lilley, of the World Wide Web Corsortium (W3C), would give some background to the SVG standard. As it turned out Lilley was unable to attend, which made discussion quite difficult as other attendees had questions, with no one to answer them.
Dan Mills of Adobe Systems stepped in to offer some background on SVG. With Adobe’s recent demonstration of SVG fonts at Seybold this seemed appropriate. The few facts that emerged pointed towards SVG fonts being for display work only, since they are unhinted. Additionally it was pointed out that SVG fonts were only one of a number of ways of dealing with type in HTML (Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), font tags, system and embeddable fonts amongst other solutions).
One of the immediate questions that arose was about document interchange, from David Berlow, how could an author distribute his SVG image and have people edit it? SVG fonts travel with the graphic, but to re-edit the document the original fonts are required – an SVG font shouldn’t be converted into a system font by the editing application.
Essentially Berlow’s question led on to his real point, how do ‘authorised users’ edit the graphic, but not unauthorised ones? At this point the meeting veered away from SVG and towards general intellectual property and protection/encryption issues. Berlow coined the phrase “Editable, Embeddable, Encryptable”.
This type of discussion generally ends up with Operating System and application vendors throwing up their hands in dispair. The cause of this is the perceived support overheads, no application vendor wants their customers calling asking why some other vendor’s fonts don’t work (encryption necessarily brings with it some support overhead as well as deliberately locking out some users – who often don’t realise the cause).
Among the 50 or so people present plenty of ideas were thrown around to resolve this problem. My own personal view is that if application vendors want their products to use other people’s intellectual property, then they have to shoulder at least part of the burden of protecting such.
The meeting broke up with a small working group; David Berlow, Erik Spiekermann, Nick Nussbaum, Bruno Steinert and Dan Mills. The group will meet again during the conference and hopefully generate some ideas for moving forward on the issues raised, partnering with OS and applications vendors.
