An interesting point made here:
There is something absurd about typography on the web. Think about these scenarios: You don’t need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don’t need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don’t need to own Times to read the Times. You don’t need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane.
And yet this same logic doesn’t apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser. You are reading Arial right now. That’s right, Arial. Why? Because everybody on Earth has a licensed version of Arial on their computer. The great democracy of the internet has failed to produce typography any better than the least common denominator of system fonts. As a designer, I hope you are outraged and offended. So what can you do about it?
The problem it two-fold. First is that the above info is not altogether accurate — you don’t need to own Goudy to read a book set in it, but the publisher/printer did, in fact, buy that Goudy font and pay for it based on it being use to typeset a book. Ditto, presumably, for video presentations.
The second problem is more fundamental, and that’s the distributed nature of fonts on the web. The font itself is not driven by the service provider or web page, but by what’s installed on the person’s machine. The reason that Arial — or a whole slew of other fonts — are used so much is that they are already out on people’s machines, as stated. The best of the solutions the author describes in the rest of the article — creating open-source versions of classic fonts — will work only insofar as people are willing or able to download those fonts once created. And that’s a proposal I’m dubious will happen, unless it’s done automagically in conjunctoin with, say, browser downloads, similar to the way Micro$oft used to make Tahoma and Verdana and Georgia available for download. Imagine if Mozilla made some standard Open Source fonts available for download in a similar fashion with Firefox …
This is sometimes done on a site-by-site basis — Marn used to have a link, I think, to let her readers download the Mead Bold that her site is designed around. But to be successful, fonts need to be as easily available and downloadable as PDF readers and other plug-ins — easier, in fact, so that it’s transparent to the viewer.
Some day.
There are, in fact, dozens and dozens of knock-offs of “classic” fonts — Arial is an example of this (it’s a knockoff of Helvetica) — and the “classic” fonts are already available for free. Helvetica, Times, Times New Roman — these have been the most common in print for ages.
Way back in the dark ages of the Web — between 1993 and oh, say, 1999 — it was common to ask people to download fonts to view your page properly. But _no one did it_. Too much trouble.
What you are talking about is part of the W3C’s SVG recommendation, and folks have been working on it for some time; maybe someday we’ll see.