Quote:
Originally Posted by kso
Originally Posted by Hitch
I've no idea. But as you say, "ill-advised", fits more than one foundry's licensing terms. I'm somewhat unwilling to accept that there's an existential threat to font designers and sellers were they to allow font embedding on equal terms for both PDFs and Ebooks. I know that you can unzip EPUBs, and that Kindle books before KFX could be unpacked. But I never even thought about extracting fonts from a PDF. So I had a look to see if it's actually possible.
It is. All you need is one of the very first Google results if you're so inclined. One is a stackoverflow page with more than half a dozen ways of getting fonts out of PDF files. Admittedly most are somewhat elaborate, but extract them you can.
Checking my PC I also realised that I wouldn't even have to install any software. Most of the stuff you need is standard Linux fare and just requires a little command line typing, something I do all day (I started my computing career with UNIX III, followed by SunOS, Solaris and since about '97 or '98 Linux in various flavours).
Klaus
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Yes and that's exactly
why subsetting makes sense. Most folks, except in the case of the most outrageously expensive faces (yes, yes, Avenir Next, I'm lookin' at you!) will not sit there and concatenate, find, extract, fill-in, etc. for a font, to make an entire face. They just won't. And if, like our friend Avenir, they're looking at a font with myriad faces and weights, fuhgeddaboudit. They won't. That's why subsetting is rational.
I do think that font designers do face an existential threat.
Warning: RANT FOLLOWS:!
I'm sorry, but I've been on the receiving end of just how "honest" people are, with digital goods and "computer files" and lemme tell ya, they will steal you BLIND.
Blind.
This codswallop about how the people that download pirated books wouldn't pay for a book
anyway, as if
that makes it okay...fine, then they can live without it or break the law or whatever, but I know
for a fact that the first two years I had my business open, making (only) ebooks--so, we're talking a few hundred bucks, absolute TOPS back then, for an eBook (and most were more like $125-$150ea, if not even less than that),
we were ripped off $10K the first year and $12K the second. That was the END of "pay upon completion" for me.
And back then, that was a good-sized chunk of my annual take. Not a few points, as it would be now.
When I was in Real Estate Development, for decades, people always heard that and made that "oooooh" sound, then saying 'ohemgee, you must work with really dishonest people and run into crooks and the mob, etc. all the time!" And yes, we did work with people like that. And let me say this about that--those people were FAR more honest than what *I've* seen, from people receiving/buying/using from providers, in the digital products and services world. FAR more honest.
I'd extend credit to a "laundry" guy in NYC, again, for laundry service to a hotel, twice as fast as I'd do that for a big expensive ebook job from somebody I didn't know. It's simply numbers. I have been bent over, hosed and ripped-off FAR FAR more, in the digital world, than ever in the world of "real" crooks.
Font designers have every right to be neurotic and paranoid about their products being stolen. For God's sakes, you can find almost any font on some pirate site today. And people have no way of tracking that, at all. I don't blame them one iota for using no-subsetting (even though I think it's nuts, for their sakes) or no-embedding or no-whatever. If they've been in the biz for the last decade, they know what I know; they've experienced what I've experienced.
In short: sadly,
people are only honest when they think that they can or will be caught or penalized. Copyright infringement, or in the case of fonts, some minor software theft? That no police station in the world will enforce or arrest them for? Don't make me bloody laugh. It's sad but true and I'll tell ya, I was bloody sad to learn it. I
wish I didn't know it, but I do.
That experience has changed how I view people generally; it's tinted my view of the world and I don't know
anybody else in the same or similar lines of work that hasn't had the same issues. (If they say that they haven't,
typically, they have a very small or trusted client base, or they work for someone else and don't have to collect payments, etc. I'm not saying that apodictically, every single person will cheat, or steal, or that every single business in the digital arena has the same exact percentage of theft, if they're stoopid enough to do pay upon completion--but man, it's widely prevalent and it's...well.)
/end rant.
(And if any of you say, "Tell us how you really feel, Hitch," I'll pimp-slap you.)
Hitch