[whatwg] Need document.available_fonts() call

Ashley Sheridan ash at ashleysheridan.co.uk
Tue May 11 07:26:43 PDT 2010


On Tue, 2010-05-11 at 16:14 +0200, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> On Tue, 11 May 2010 16:08:01 +0200, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
> > On 5/11/10 9:39 AM, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
> >> Is there really much of a need for this though?
> >
> > Good question.  What _is_ the use case here, exactly?
> 
> E.g. allowing the user to select a font in a text editing or drawing  
> application. However, for portability it would probably be better if these  
> were limited to fonts already on the Web.
> 
> 


I agree, portability dictates that they should stick to the few common
fonts, or we end up with the same situation I've had countless times
where someone sent an MSWord file with all the bullets as some character
from the Wingdings font then wonder why people complain that all their
bullets are letters.

Embedding the font isn't feasible in this case because you really can't
trust the end-user to observe the legal aspects of the fonts they have
on their system. The designer of a font may not have given user rights
to distribute the font in a document that is publically available like
this.

Thanks,
Ash
http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk


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