[thelist] Liquidity and giftext

Sam-I-Am sam at sam-i-am.com
Fri Jul 7 14:31:46 CDT 2000


I have agree with James, I spent a *long* time trying to get this work,
before shelving the idea.
I'll attempt a nutshell:

The 2 "technololgies" are:
MS OpenType. This allows you to create a subset of the entire (truetype)
font that contains only the characters your page(s) need. (obvious
problems here).
Otherwise its strong - it's basically a secure way of embedding a
TrueType font (it'll work if you have IE 4+, any platform)... but in a
web context this poses it's own problems (most fonts are not optimised
for the low resolution, small pt sizes we have on the web). Compression
was not so good. Even using just the first 128 ascii characters I was
coming out with 30k a font.

Bitstreams TrueDoc 
As I understand it snags a set of outlines from the font you are
converting. All the output is antialiased (at all sizes). When I was
trying this (about 1 yr ago) there were issues with this as the
antialiasing showed up as a white glow against anything but a white
background. Compression was good though - (e.g. 15-20k a font)

>From a HTML standpoint it was possible to serve one to Netscape and
another to IE, but the results were so disperate across the browsers (to
say nothing of the laborious process to get you there) that we ended up
shelving the idea.

However, there are cases where you might consider it. (I love the pacman
demo on microsoft's typography site.. which btw is a great resource: 
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/demos/7/demo7.htm

hth
Sam




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