fsync(2)

I am on the fence on this one. I had some font issues with a PDF I am generating with the pdf-writer gem for a Rails project. It’s not all that serious. The database stores UTF-8 text, and users cut and paste from Microsoft Word (or whatever). Those characters are not rendered correctly in the PDF file version. I really want to try and store whatever they put into the database properly, but I have to translate those characters to ISO-8859-1 to remove the characters that will not render correctly. On my Mac the characters in question are usually translated to something close enough, but on Linux the characters are simply removed. I’ve seen a number of people ask about this, and that’s where I got the solution from (basically redefining the PDF module’s Writer class text() instance method, among other steps to fully “solve” the problem). Don’t ask me how to solve this. What I did was given as the only solution I could find. Maybe Prawn will solve this someday, but it is not quite ready for my use.

This got me on some font exploration in an attempt to embed a font. I had also read a number of articles in my RSS feeds about fonts lately – in particular web fonts. I even bought some font tools to try some of this out. This got me nowhere however. I can’t just embed the fonts I generally have on my Mac without surely violating some license, and even though I just wanted to try to see if this was a viable solution – it turns out that it really isn’t due to what type of font I seem to be able to embed anyway. Even if I had a license to embed, I can’t get the resulting PDF into a state that meets the license requirements (for example, on my Mac Preview always asks me if I want to install the font from the file generated by pdf-writer). Therefore I just gave up on this path. And to be clear, I am strongly against violating any license whatsoever, so I will never go down that route.

After this work I became interested in web fonts. As far as I am concerned, the only real solution to the web font question is buying fonts from Fontspring. I don’t want my fonts hosted elsewhere because I don’t generally want to trust my site to some third party (you can probably guess what my general feeling on that oh so well defined concept of cloud computing concept is – let’s just say I don’t necessarily think it is all puppies and kittens – but I don’t discount it at all regardless of this feeling). I don’t use things like GitHub either, preferring to host my own Git repositories (not that anyone would miss my code at the moment probably, but fairly soon there will be something really useful there – at which point I’ll probably have to also host code elsewhere, but let me dream about my self-hosting utopia for now please :-)

Back to the story. Fontspring is fine. Most of the font licenses are reasonable. I am not a typographer, but some of those licenses are insane IMO. I had no idea fonts were this much of a pain. Seriously? I guess I can see why to some degree. Fonts are truly magical and typography is important, but using fonts on the web needs to change eventually I think. It’s a little crazy. I used a couple of fonts I bought from Fontspring on this site’s index page. They are nothing particularly special. My main goal was just to see how to do it, and then see if it worked on all the major browsers I have to test with (just about everything of any relevance). This all worked fine, but it took forever for me to figure out how to remove any unused glyphs due to this licensing restriction:

2. The Web Font must be subset to include only the glyphs necessary for displaying the web site.

Sigh. Seriously? I can’t just use the web font file that was provided? I actually have to remove all the glyphs not used on my site? That’s a nightmare. I can hear the typographers now, “We don’t care what you think. This is not overly difficult. I mean, we can’t have someone stealing a font you paid less than $20 for!” This is not easy IMO. Not at all. I’d love someone to tell me it is. The only solution I’ve found is to use Font Squirrel. I made sure I checked what seemed like the right options based on the other license restrictions, even though the source (the web font only version, not the desktop one) probably doesn’t have some of the possible features that would be questionable anyway. From my understanding, this is all fine.

Is this process worth it? Right now I have to say no. If I had some insanely great font (and expensive – because you know it will be even more insane to purchase) it might be. I am just starting to explore web fonts because I do believe that typography is important. Regardless, the process for dealing with this is a huge pain (and no, I don’t want to use some hosting service that charges even more insane prices based on various criteria). Maybe I just don’t get it… oh, but I think I really do in fact.

I am going to explore some free fonts as well. Maybe there are some good ones that will make me feel better. Obviously I am not a typographer, so I don’t want to come off as complaining about getting something for free. I am more than willing to pay reasonable prices for fonts if I don’t have to rely on someone else to host them. Reasonable to me is in the hundreds of dollars range for decent fonts if I can do what I generally want. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I’d be willing to remove glyphs if we could do something more like “a reasonable subset” instead of “any glyph unnecessary to render your site” (and to note, I take that exactly as how it is stated, plus can we get a really good, easy to use free tool to do this – maybe that’s going too far and soon I’ll learn how it really is a lot easier than I thik… I just doubt it). I am a just an average potential customer, perhaps way less than average in the fonts world, and this seems to be somewhat completely lame to at least a degree.

I do like my less than $40 font collection (I bought two families). That’s not saying much in the world of fonts. In my limited investigation, it seems many fonts, if not most, cost an arm, leg, and then head – plus selling whatever is left of your soul for the ability to use some of the glyphs with 476 restrictions. Heh. Yeah, I just like to complain I guess.