Comments on: Beta-testing Typotheque’s Font Embedding Technology http://blog.cycle-interactive.com/?p=294 Interactive Agency Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:04:26 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Peter Bilak http://blog.cycle-interactive.com/?p=294&cpage=1#comment-267 Peter Bilak Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:24:52 +0000 http://blog.rdsny.com/?p=294#comment-267 Hey Dyske, thanks for the close look. Security is an interesting issue. I recently heard a programmer say: "There is no "scale" from simple and difficult protection. It is either absent or a click away." I am not going to make any claims that Typotheque system is hacker-proof. If someone has plenty of time and knowledge, than it is possible to extract the font. The point is that the font can't be copied by casual use, one has to write scripts to do it. Even then, he gets only 5-10% of the font information, because the font were subset, and 90-95% of font information is simply absent. Typotheque fonts are generated on demand, for specific project, for specific language, with specific OpenType features applied, so they are hardly usable by others, with different requirements. We also remove some font tables which are not necessary for browsers. This shrinks the font files, speeds us downloading, and makes the fonts impossible to install on your computer. For any reasonable designer this is simply not worth the time and effort, but I am sure there will be some that will try it. All other systems (Typekit, Kernest..) face the same reality. They/we made a similar series of precaution to avoid casual misuse. I would be confident enough to offer our system to other font foundries, precisely because, we run it on our IP, which is our livelihood, and we take the protection very seriously. Hey Dyske, thanks for the close look. Security is an interesting issue. I recently heard a programmer say: “There is no “scale” from simple and difficult protection. It is either absent or a click away.”

I am not going to make any claims that Typotheque system is hacker-proof. If someone has plenty of time and knowledge, than it is possible to extract the font. The point is that the font can’t be copied by casual use, one has to write scripts to do it. Even then, he gets only 5-10% of the font information, because the font were subset, and 90-95% of font information is simply absent. Typotheque fonts are generated on demand, for specific project, for specific language, with specific OpenType features applied, so they are hardly usable by others, with different requirements. We also remove some font tables which are not necessary for browsers. This shrinks the font files, speeds us downloading, and makes the fonts impossible to install on your computer.

For any reasonable designer this is simply not worth the time and effort, but I am sure there will be some that will try it. All other systems (Typekit, Kernest..) face the same reality. They/we made a similar series of precaution to avoid casual misuse. I would be confident enough to offer our system to other font foundries, precisely because, we run it on our IP, which is our livelihood, and we take the protection very seriously.

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