Before I dive into a discussion on Font Embedding I thought it might be appropriate to provide a frame of reference about this author. Believe it or not I’ve been personally involved with digital fonts in one way or another since I graduated from RIT in 1981. A lot has happened in the past 27 years (has it really been that long?) and as technology marches on a lot will surely change in the future!

I am fortunate to be part of a very talented team of type designers, font software engineers and font licensing & marketing experts at Ascender. We have all worked closely together since our days at Monotype in the 1990’s and are driven by a sincere passion for type and typographic problem solving. We have all been part of creating some of the world’s most influential fonts used by millions of people on a daily basis: in computer operating systems, printers, mobile phones, game consoles and countless consumer and enterprise software products.

What I have come to appreciate is how the entire ecosystem of commercial type designers and foundries around the world is completely dependent on the responsible use and licensing of font software by our customers. It is incumbent upon all of us in the type community to speak up and participate in the continued evolution of font technologies.

The impetus for the FontEmbedding.com website was what we saw as the potential misunderstanding of “Font Embedding” and “Web Fonts”. At the “The Business of Type” seminar in April 2008 (organized by the Font Designers Rights Coalition (FDRC) and hosted by Microsoft at their campus in Redmond, Washington) there were some great presentations and discussions. One of the topics that concerned us was the untethered use of Font Linking with Safari.

If you look back at the origins of Font Embedding, the intent is the same then as it is now: provide viewers of documents with the ability to see the fonts which the author used on to design the original document. The first embedded fonts were truly embedded in a document – they were not external resources but rather included inside the document.

But “Web Fonts” presents a wide range of technical and business challenges. How to best provide web designers with a more creative palette of fonts while still protecting the Intellectual Property of font software designers & vendors.

Of all the technologies we have evaluated, EOT (Embedded OpenType) represents the most viable solution to serve all the stakeholders of fonts. And that’s not simply because we do font work for Microsoft – we make fonts for Google, Red Hat and other Microsoft competitors. However, we fully support the efforts of people at Microsoft, Monotype Imaging and Adobe to have the W3C standardize EOT. And we encourage the developers of web browsers on all platforms to add support for EOT.

We look forward to hearing the comments of others in the font community, including web designers and software developers, and encourage the participation in this dialog to make the changes necessary to shape the future of type design and font software!