Excursus

As I have remarked before, good typography does not merely have aesthetic virtue. Importantly, it has cognitive virtue as well. Good typesetting makes your work easier to understand. A good font is but one element of typesetting, and a font may be appropriate to one context but not others. Still, font choice is one of those important decisions in typesetting your documents that you are forced to make.

Legislation that has not kept abreast of changing technology can make the choice difficult.

As a philosopher, I write research papers, drafts of which are distributed on the web as PDFs. Open access to evolving research is important, and I am committed to it. Since I want to give my work the best chance of being understood, I take the time to properly typeset the PDFs with XeLaTeX. There is a problem, however, with distributing PDFs over the web.

PDF files can contain font information in a way that is easily extractable from the file. While the licensing of some type foundries allow embedded fonts in PDFs, many (especially smaller type foundries) do not. Indeed the ones that did probably did so at Adobe’s urging when PDF distribution on the web was relatively small and so not that great of a risk.

I would like to support small type foundries by buying their fonts. There are some brilliant type designers out there, and they should be rewarded. Unfortunately, since the main thing I want these fonts for is for web distributed PDFs, I can’t do that without violating licensing restrictions. And that’s not support.

There are of course open source fonts. Some of them are fine pieces of work. But the choice is limited, and important design decisions should not be so constrained.

DRM is not the answer, as the recent history of music distribution online sadly reveals.

I don’t know how to resolve this problem. It is partly technological, partly, legal. But I thought I would highlight for other academics who distribute their work online.

Upon finishing this post, I came across this essay that has more information about the legal and technological obstacles with some discussion of potential solutions.