Why Rent or Buy, When You Can Rasterize.
typophile.com
typophile.com
Non-standard fonts are used sparingly precisely because they have to be rasterized.
He is talking about the state of affairs and how that creates an immediate opportunity for type designers willing to sell rasterized versions of their fonts, not suggesting an alternative to the @font-face support.
This also doesn't break resizing any more than any other design element on the page would. Try going to any blog and resizing; the layout breaks. That's just how it goes if you want a page that looks nice. (Even HN doesn't resize nicely, and it doesn't use any images at all.)
So basically, this is a non-issue for 98% of the users. For the 1% of the users that use w3m without images enabled, they can still read all of the text. The 1% of users that are blind, can still have all the text read to them by the screen reader.
Sometimes I think people make these arguments because other people have made the same arguments for years. It's like a disease....
(Video rentals are similar. First sale, and all that.)
PS. By "local fonts" I mean http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4475069/Font_Collection_(65_...
> who needs a service ?
Foundries do. You know, the people who actually make your "local fonts". Also those who recognize what a complex task the type design is and want to compensate them for their work.
To address your rather poorly communicated point though: the concept of IP isn't going to disappear, especially not overnight. To pretend that we don't need to find solutions around the IP minefield is unwise at best.
http://github.com/flyingsaucer/jitterbug
Also, is copying really illegal? What law and jurisdiction are you referring to?
Technologically speaking, that's not really any different then saying "That's a link to a page that solely consists of a link to the illegal copy." Whether the protocol is HTTP or BitTorrent isn't really relevant. "Oh we don't host illegal stuff we only provide torrents, all the stuff is distributed elsewhere" may be (though quite possibly isn't) a valid legal defense for the torrent site hosting it, but doesn't really have any place when discussing the appropriateness of linking to it from here.
And obtaining an unlicensed copy of the fonts from those foundries will be illegal (definition: something that you can be successfully sued for by said foundries in court) in essentially any First-world country. Certainly in the U.S., where OP, you, I, and probably the majority of news.yc are located.
I really hate people talking about "illegal stuff". I don't see why it's natural or obvious that there is even such a thing as illegal information, or an illegal action you can take with information. The idea that you can incriminate yourself merely by copying a file, no matter what that file is, is abhorrent to me.
And that makes it okay for you to use them? If you object philosophically to their position then don't use the product they produce; justifying your desire to use their product without paying them certainly doesn't indicate high moral standards on your part.
"The idea that you can incriminate yourself merely by copying a file, no matter what that file is, is abhorrent to me."
Because information has value and without a way of getting recompensed for that value nobody will take the time to create the information.
What do you do, and why should you get paid for it?
The top 500 or so fonts should just be moved into the public domain en masse so we can forget about this ridiculous issue once and for all. Sucks if you're a foundry but you don't get to collect windfall profits for the rest of your life just because you made a slightly more attractive capital A a few months before someone else would have done the same, and the cost of administrating that "property" far outweighs any benefit such a property regime might theoretically deliver.