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No Such Thing as a Free Font

Designers fret over potential for hackers to pirate type By Richard Sine PART OF THE reason the World Wide Web looks a little Vegas these days--heavy on flash and dash, low on aesthetic dignity--is because fonts, those quiet testaments to the god of legibility, have yet to make much of an imprint. Currently, the end user's computer usually determines what kind of font will display Web text. End users usually only have access to a few old standby fonts, making Web text look fairly dull and uniform. Web designers hope that building in, or "embedding," whatever fonts they choose will make Web design easier on the eyes. Such technologies may exist by next year. But Web embedding has its dangers. Small-time font designers worry that fonts distributed out on the Web may be too easy for hackers to reproduce without paying them for the font design. They're already threatened by wholesale pirating of the software that creates their font. "Small foundries do not like the idea of their fonts being broadcast all over the world without controls or checks," says Erik Van Blokland, a cutting-edge type designer based in the Netherlands. "Especially checks." Software megaliths Adobe and Microsoft recently announced that they had created a standard for type design, called Open Type, that will allow web designers to embed all fonts using the most common "platforms" for type, TruType and Type 1. David Lemon, manager of type development at Adobe, says the two companies are working on encryption methods that will protect font designers using Open Type on the Web. Open Type should become common currency sometime next year. Until then, Lemon admits reluctantly, there's some danger that fonts on the Web will not be secure. "It takes some hacking to extract a font from a [Web] document. To my knowledge nobody has done it except to satisfy curiosity or prove a point." But Erik van Blokland says it is all too easy to download fonts from the Web, especially from files formatted in Adobe's own Acrobat program. Blokland hopes that Adobe and Microsoft will come up with good encryption methods. But he notes that big companies like Adobe and Microsoft are quite willing to package fonts cheaply along with the software programs that provide most of their profit. This gives them less of an incentive to labor on foolproof encryption methods on their platforms. The little foundries, by contrast, make all their money from fonts. That's why most small foundries won't allow Web designers to embed their fonts until they get clear evidence that they're safe from pirates. The Web may spell the end of the road for the professional typeface designer, according to David Siegel of Palo Alto. Siegel has designed a few fonts himself but now spends most of his time designing Web pages and bestowing his prestigious "High Five" award on other pages with good design. He says that fonts on sites are going to be very important to developers, but "font designers making a living designing fonts really is a far-fetched concept these days. People won't want to pay much to put fonts in their sites. As soon as someone comes out with one thousand Web fonts for two dollars, everyone will buy that and only big companies will pay for decent fonts." Font designers are looking at ways to charge a company a small amount every time a Web surfer "hits" an ad containing their font. Meanwhile, some designers may flourish on the Web out of sheer innovation. Van Blokland is working on Web fonts that will actually change as readers read them, or as the mouse pointer nears or clicks on them. He's programming these new fonts in the Java language--which makes them impenetrable to pirates. "The sky's the limit," he says. "The Web may open up a whole new branch of typography." [ Metro | Metroactive Central | Archives ]