Printing & Copying

Web typography sucks. It's a fact. It sucks primarily because web pages are of dubious typographic value, whether you print them or just read them. The inability to use your own fonts & proper formatting is infuriating, and almost led me to close down this blog in despair. But I have a solution.

The solution is nothing short of a new type of XML language for the presentation, as well as a different kind of browser that makes viewing text easier. No support for b/s like Flash, Java, SLL, and all that nonsense – if you want mediocrity, you can get it from Firefox, IE or opera. What I'm talking about is a simple mark-up language.

What's typography? First, fonts. These have to be downloadable and I don't care how it's done, but people should be able to use the fonts they bought, even if it means that the fonts end up in the hands of people who didn't pay for them. Font piracy is rampant already as it is, so I doubt anything would change. Second, the rendering of text on the screen must have complete OpenType support, with no exceptions. This is somewhat harder than just writing a browser using WPF and hoping that the Microsoft API understands OT properly. It most likely won't. In fact, having dabbled with OT features in WPF, I know for a fact that it's pretty weak.

The only problem with what I outline is the uptake: how to convince people that PDFs are not the only way to deliver printable content? Or perhaps that's the whole point – maybe PDFs are precisely the solution? Hmm, we'll have to wait and see.▪