Interesting. Is this doing a lookup somewhere to locate the font origin, or is there going to be a standard metadata element in WOFF? You’d think the vendors would jump at the chance to make it this easy to locate & buy fonts.
It will only get the font files that are provided by urls in the @font-face rules, so downloading the font will download from that web server or wherever the font is hosted — it downloads them exactly as Firefox did. There’s no metadata telling the origin of the font, as far as I know.
Fonts are not discoverable enough right now on the web, definitely. Especially since you can name the font-family whatever you want in @font-face rules (and you can name the font files themselves whatever you want), you really just can’t tell what the real name of the font is (and thus, how to buy the font) without downloading and opening the font file.
The WOFF and TTF/OTF formats do have metadata showing who is the author and the foundry and especially what license a particular font is released under: if it is a libre/open font released under a community-approved license like the OFL – Gentium in your example – or not. In these metadata fields there are at least 3 URLs which could very usefully be exposed to the visitor of a webpage: Designer URL, Vendor URL and License URL.
This extension has interesting potential: my suggestions would be to use a small section of the statusbar instead of a inactive menu entry to show the font name, to include more design information (a bit like Font Finder) but more importantly the metadata to describe the font in a small dialog box. This would allow visitors to learn about the origin authorship quality openness of the given font and then make an educated choice if they like it and want to do more with it and not just simply try to download everything they come across….
Making it easier for visitors to find the upstream websites of these open fonts via a search engine or by querying a remote open font catalog which knows about the existing quality libre/open fonts would be very useful.
Excellent, many thanks for pointing this out. There’s still the problem of downloading and reading the font file that hopefully bug 467669 will alleviate
As for the addon, there’s one that does something more like what you want: Type Gauge I made this one because I wanted something in the context menu instead.
I’ll see what I can come up with by downloading/parsing the font files.
Heather's Paragraphs
Interesting. Is this doing a lookup somewhere to locate the font origin, or is there going to be a standard metadata element in WOFF? You’d think the vendors would jump at the chance to make it this easy to locate & buy fonts.
It will only get the font files that are provided by urls in the @font-face rules, so downloading the font will download from that web server or wherever the font is hosted — it downloads them exactly as Firefox did. There’s no metadata telling the origin of the font, as far as I know.
Fonts are not discoverable enough right now on the web, definitely. Especially since you can name the font-family whatever you want in @font-face rules (and you can name the font files themselves whatever you want), you really just can’t tell what the real name of the font is (and thus, how to buy the font) without downloading and opening the font file.
The WOFF and TTF/OTF formats do have metadata showing who is the author and the foundry and especially what license a particular font is released under: if it is a libre/open font released under a community-approved license like the OFL – Gentium in your example – or not. In these metadata fields there are at least 3 URLs which could very usefully be exposed to the visitor of a webpage: Designer URL, Vendor URL and License URL.
See the medatata fields description
and also for WOFF.
Hopefully the work done around bug 467669 will allow that information to be made available to web designers and users.
This extension has interesting potential: my suggestions would be to use a small section of the statusbar instead of a inactive menu entry to show the font name, to include more design information (a bit like Font Finder) but more importantly the metadata to describe the font in a small dialog box. This would allow visitors to learn about the origin authorship quality openness of the given font and then make an educated choice if they like it and want to do more with it and not just simply try to download everything they come across….
Making it easier for visitors to find the upstream websites of these open fonts via a search engine or by querying a remote open font catalog which knows about the existing quality libre/open fonts would be very useful.
Excellent, many thanks for pointing this out. There’s still the problem of downloading and reading the font file that hopefully bug 467669 will alleviate
As for the addon, there’s one that does something more like what you want: Type Gauge I made this one because I wanted something in the context menu instead.
I’ll see what I can come up with by downloading/parsing the font files.