Friday, October 30, 2009

Understanding Web Fonts: book proposal

Comments on this proposal appreciated.

Synopsis

This short book will offer a guide to anyone who wants to understand and implement web fonts. Its practical section will concentrate on WOFF fonts which seem overwhelmingly likely to offer the most future-aware and ideology-free format. The goal will be to give web designers and developers a clear understanding of the new technology, so they know when and how to implement it.

The Project

I would like to invite collaborators and contributors personally, but anyone who wants to contribute is welcome to contact me as project originator so we can compare notes.

The text will be written online, although see http://www.socialbysocial.com/book/creation-social-by-social

It will be published under GNU Free Documentation License, v1.3 or later, and the copyright will be held by ‘Contributors to the Webfonts book’.

A commercial publishing agreement will be sought. This would be comparable to the agreements for books like Version control with Subversion and Pro Git. If the book is published commercially then any royalties will be distributed between contributors involved in each static release (== print edition). http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

To set the topic in context it will give in about 10,000 words

  • an outline of the history of the technology
  • an explanation of advantages, both perceived and real
  • a guide to the history of typeface publishing, to explain where the special problems come from
  • a concise set of use cases for web fonts:
    • graphic design and branding considerations (the major commercial drivers)
    • academic research into ancient languages and transliterated documents that use obsolete characters
    • minority languages (those poorly supported by operating systems: the Indian subcontinent, for example)

The main text of the book, which is at a first guess estimated at 15,000 words or so, would provide

  • technical info about the preferred format, WOFF, as a set of references to, and elaboration of, documentation emerging online (eg the Kew/Leming/van Blokland WOFF spec, the W3C Web Fonts group charter and Candidate Recommendation pages)
  • howtos for authors wanting to
    • use cloud font services like Typekit
    • make WOFF fonts, including advice on subsetting for lower bandwidth/faster rendering
    • host web fonts
    • create style rules that encompass the widest range of user agents
    • understand their legal rights and obligations when using commercial web fonts

Then, as it is very early days, we may speculate briefly on what will happen in the future in about 5,000 words:

  • impact on the web
  • impact on the font publishing world
  • Fine typography in user agents, eg the Mozilla demo by Jonathan Kew. http://bit.ly/3sXGLh
  • an opportunity for free/libre fonts?

References

Documentation
Demos
Discussions
EOT Lite [CWT], Mozilla et al
Discussion/analysis: oldish but set context

Edit: corrected heading hierarchy

Labels: , , ,

Posted by Ben Weiner at 8:34 AM [Permanent link]

Comments (7)

11:27 AM | Blogger Simon said:
Some thoughts on tech books in general:

Don't spend so long on the "why" that people give up before the "how". Background to web fonts, why past things haven't worked and what we're doing about it now should take up at most one chapter. If you find yourself wanting to talk about the beauty of metal type and why Unicode screws up tiny Amazonian tribes, stick it all in an appendix.

Also your last section looks like it's going to be predictions for the future. This isn't always a great idea in the technology world because you'll always come back to it looking embarrassed in a few years time; the Internet has a surprising way of choosing the most perverse and unpredictable of a series of future paths.
As far as the main body goes, think about your audience - mainly webmasters, at a guess - and the questions that they're going to be asking. I would bet that the key questions are not "What makes this technology work?" but "How can I make prettier web sites?" So that's what you have to focus on. Keep the main bulk of it howtos, with marginal explanations where necessary.

Personally I would give an example of getting web font embedding working really early on in the book so that people don't have to wade through chapters of background to get what they're after. Something quick and working that looks good, that people can try out for themselves, will make people happy. Then follow that up with more advanced stuff, bringing in the theory as you go along.

This means that you only get into, e.g., the specifications of WOFF when the practical examples demand it - I think that's a good principle: let the tasks which will be of practical benefit to your audience drive the explanation.

I'm always happy to advise more if you have any questions, and I'd love to see how the plan progresses.

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8:41 PM | Blogger Richard Fink said:
@ben

My feeling is that the book you propose is already being written as we talk about it.
Something as game-changing as web fonts is bound to elicit an enormous amount of observations, comments, tutorials, etc.
Its already been written about extensively - if not definitively - so I don't really know what you can add. Basically, the book will be an editing job. The meat being provided by others.
Sorry for being negative but I've thought of writing a little guide myself but decided against it for these same reasons.
I am, however, going to write up a little case study about my own blog, Readable Web in the hope that the sheer specificity adds something that doesn't already exist.
Once again, sorry. I hate saying, "Don't".
I am grateful for the links you've provided. I don't know much about collaborative book-writing on the web.
Regards, Rich

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8:30 AM | Blogger Ben Weiner said:
@Rich broadly, I agree that this is an editing job. But isn’t it the nature of the web to be a place where ultimately everything can found, and isn’t that often the problem rather than the solution? Do you think an editing job would fail to add anything by the act of consolidation?

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8:34 AM | Blogger Ben Weiner said:
Ars Technica posted on WOFF yesterday, adding another condensed explanation (and further reducing the need for a book?)

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1:13 PM | Blogger Richard Fink said:
Like I said, I was tempted to attempt it, too. (Still am.) Or to get involved in a collaborative project as you suggest.
"@Font-Face: The Definitive Guide" sounds like something very useful.
Thinking out loud, what's bothering me is how effective it will be for the effort involved.
Can it rise above a lot of the information/misinformation that I've already started to see floating around? Can it be put together quickly? Good info a year too late won't help much.
Also, web developers ingest stuff in little chunks.
I fear that, for the effort, the work will get lost. And I'm wondering exactly what you mean by a "book". To make up something Yogi Berra might say, "Books aren't what they used to be."
I've got an email address for you from the www-font list. Let me mull. I might get in touch offline.
And don't let my misgivings discourage you in any way.
Heck, I'm preparing a post about one aspect of @font-face that includes a video presentation, too. So it's not like I've stopped or won't be writing about it.
Later - I'll be back.

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5:03 PM | Blogger Ben Weiner said:
@Rich Thanks. I'm looking forward to your note :-)

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11:17 AM | Blogger Ben Weiner said:
Meanwhile http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator has commoditised the process of generating webfont files and CSS with @font-face rules and kindly also left an information trail so others can do their own learning if they want. It is interesting to see how neatly this stitches the various components together ;-)

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