First, let's look at the current technologies. Netscape, partnering with Bitstream, has released Navigator 4.0 with TrueDoc. According to Bitstream's Colleen Cronin, when a designer uses a typeface on a Web page, a TrueDoc-enabled authoring tool "records all of the character shapes used in the creation end and stores the glyphs in a compacted data form called the Portable Font Resource that travels along with the document." When you receive this PFR with your page, Navigator renders it to the screen using something called a Character Shape Player.
And that's the key message Bitstream keeps repeating - you're not sending fonts, you're sending "shapes" that represent the characters in the form you want. In fact, they won't even refer to their technology as embedding, but instead use that term as a negative feature of their competitors' technology. "The character shapes never become a font because they cannot be embedded onto the recipient system and are available for viewing and printing only," said Cronin.
Microsoft, which has partnered with Adobe, offers a different solution. Touting their new, unified OpenType format, the two companies are pushing ahead on a separate path toward font embedding online. The new format attempts to merge features from both Microsoft's TrueType and Adobe's Type1 font formats, according to David Meltzer of Microsoft's Typography Group. "It's the best of both worlds," he said. "OpenType offers the printing benefits of Type1, with the screen quality and hinting of TrueType."
These fonts, of course, can also be embedded, a feature developed long ago for document sharing in Microsoft Word 6.0. An OpenType font file can be tagged by the type designer or foundry with one of four levels of embedding - no embedding, "print preview," which allows simple viewing on screen or paper, "editable," which allows the recipient to change the document containing the font, and "full installability," which adds the face to the system permanently. According to Microsoft, less than 5 percent of TrueType fonts completely disallow embedding. Type1 fonts, while easily convertible to OpenType format, don't include the embedding permissions.
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