Readable Web » E-Books

A Free RasterBRIDGE® Web Font: Puffbuddy Light

Richard Fink — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:03:46 +0000

What you see above is a screen shot taken on Windows XP.
It looks smooth and clean, right?
Unlike most so-called ‘web fonts’, all RasterBRIDGE® Web Fonts are specially prepared to look as good in Windows as they do on the Mac,
and on the iPad,
and on the iPhone,
and on the Kindle Fire, and so on and so forth.
Before we ship, we test the font in a wide variety of browsers on all major platforms and devices.

As a RasterBRIDGE® Web Font, Puffbuddy Light will remain balloony, buoyant, and jolly in any browser, on any platform.
Download it here and spread the word. Enjoy.

What’s The Font Got?

Puffbuddy Light features the HTML Basics+ Character Set. That means you get all the important HTML character entities, a full complement of spacing characters and you’re covered for the following languages:

• English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish.

RasterBRIDGE® Web Fonts Stay Small and Load Fast

RasterBRIDGE® Web Fonts are specially compressed to stay small and load fast. The Puffbuddy Light TTF font file weighs in at only 41 kb, the Woff at 28kb, and the EOT at 26kb. A whole font for the size of a small image!
And did we mention that, for the “price” of those 28 kilobytes compressed, the HTML Basics+ Character Set also covers these languages, too:

Basque, Albanian, Gaelic (Irish), Gaelic (Manx), Gaelic (Scottish), Luxembourgish, Afrikaans, Haitian_Creole, Indonesian, Javanese, Estonian, Fijian, Filipino/Tagalog, Afar, Bislama, Breton, Chamorro, Comorian, Faroese, Gilbertiese/Kiribati, Kinyanwanda, Kirundi, Luba/Ciluba/Kasai, Malagasy, Malay, Marquesan, Ndebele, Oromo, Palauan/Belauan, Quechua, Romansh, Sango, Sesotho, Setswana/Sitswa, Seychellois_Creole, SiSwati/Swati/Swazi, Somali, Sotho, Swahili, Tetum, Tok_Pisin, Tongan, Tsonga, Tswana, Tuvaluan, Uzbek/Usbek, Walloon, Xhosa, and Zulu.

¡WOW!
Ett stort värde. Ein großer Wert. A mikils virði. Yon gwo valè. Një vlerë e madhe.

When The World Shifts Beneath Your Feet

Richard Fink — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:19:03 +0000

Garrick Van Buren, my taskmaster at Kernest/Konstellations, sent me over a link to an article about how different publishers are dealing with DRM and, just as importantly, the Walmart of online publishing – Amazon.
Cutting Their Own Throats on Charlie Stross’s blog.

Uh, there seems to be a notion floating around that somehow there’s something people in the publishing biz can do to “avert the evil decree”.
(To grab an apt phrase from Jewish liturgy.)
But, like drowning in a tsunami, or any other deluge of “Biblical” proportion, there is no averting – or avoiding – the devaluation of anything that can be converted to bits and bytes.

Back in mid January, I wrote that this year already “felt” different. And it’s been. And today I’ve been musing about the people in publishing who are going to lose their jobs. Yes. They – maybe you – are going to lose your job. And no purchasing of an act of Congress like SOPA or an outfoxing of Amazon is going to prevent this.

“Teach Me To Dance, Will You, Zorba?”

“There are people who fall hard and do not find their feet for a long time, if ever — a condition some psychiatrists call complicated grief. And the depth of the economic collapse has unceremoniously stripped thousands of far more than money: reputations have reversed; friendships have turned sour; families have fractured.”

In reality we are all like beggars selling apples or pencils on a street corner. But that reality gets masked over time and people feel safe and secure. The beggars huddle for warmth within things called “industries”. After awhile, the idea that people will continue to prefer buying from “us” over the other beggars begins to look and feel like a law of nature. Life can be good, even for a beggar.

I used to work in apparel manufacturing in the United States – an industry that crumpled to nothing in the face of lower-priced foreign imports. We knew that no matter how loudly we begged, no one was going to buy from us any more.
The auto workers who used to populate Detroit know all about this, too.

When the market says to you: “We can’t pay you anymore for what you do”, you move on.

But when the world shifts beneath your feet like that, don’t just stand around flat-footed, dammit. Instead, with a fresh start, focus on the possibilities and ask Zorba to teach you how to dance. If you’re lucky, he’ll oblige.

Practical Font Design, Third Edition

Richard Fink — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:29:12 +0000

Practical Font Design
3rd Edition

In Digital Publishing you need to co-ordinate your efforts with many people. Web designers, developers, server techs – the list goes on and on – and the more you know about how those people go about their work, the better off you will be.

With fonts, the “collaboration” might take the form of a purchase, or a free download, or just a link to the font in your HTML. But there is a font-maker somewhere on the other end of that transaction. And the more you know about how that font came to be, the better off you’ll be. And unlike a lot of things in today’s fast-paced environment – where it’s hard to separate the side-shows from the main attractions – a knowledge of fonts and how they’re made won’t be obsolete in just a few years. Changes in font technology come at a snail’s pace, and what changes do come, are incremental. So what you learn about fonts will pay dividends for as long as you live. Really.

Have A “Practical” Christmas

David Bergsland’s Practical Font Design is now in its Third Edition. It’s greatly improved in many, many ways from the Second Edition. (Bergsland not only listens to reader feedback, but he acts on it, too.) It’s still the only book of its kind, and it does a simple thing: it tells you, in a friendly and to-the-point manner, how one experienced font designer and teacher – David Bergsland – goes about his work. It’s a must-buy for font designers. It’s a should-buy for any web designer, graphic designer, or anybody involved with digital publishing.
Not much interested in the technical details? – It’s worth the price just for the “history of type” section and as a flip-through reference. If you’ve ever used Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, you already know more than you necessarily need. And a demo download of FontLab Studio – the professional level font editor referenced in the book – is available for Mac and Windows free.

Here’s a little piece to give you an idea of the tone:

“My plan is to go through my decision making process so you can do the same as you develop your fonts. There is no right or wrong here. All you have to guide you in the process is your personal sense of style – what’s right and wrong.”

Practical Font Design, The Links:

Amazon Print and Kindle

Lulu PDF

Lulu Paperback

David Bergsland sells his fonts at:

Hackberry-Fonts

And blogs here, dispensing technical tips and helpful font-making tools:

Hackberry-Fonts Blog

Extensis Brings Google Web Fonts Straight Into Photoshop

Richard Fink — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:42:10 +0000

Extensis, the company behind the WebINK web font service, today announced a plug-in that brings Google Web Fonts straight into Photoshop.

Free And Open-Source Fonts Served Alongside The Proprietary, In A Surprising Twist

Since launching the WebINK web font service, Extensis has concentrated on building a library of fonts drawn from the proprietary type community, building on long-standing relationships developed through Extensis’ other font and design products: Suitcase Fusion (a desktop font manager) and Universal Type Server (a server-based font library and font license manager for workgroups).
But they haven’t left it at just being another service operating in the shadow of (now Adobe) Typekit – as services like Fontdeck, WebType, and others have done. From day one, I’ve personally seen them strive to find new ways to meet the needs of web designers with innovative software tools that, in combination with their hosting service, make the use of a font service – as opposed to shopping the web for suitable fonts and then self-hosting – a much easier and useful proposition. They’ve continuously shown up at the major web conferences to promote, of course, but also to watch and learn and listen. What’s sets them apart is that they turn around and act on that knowledge in creative ways.

Riding Piggy Back On Google’s Web Font Initiative

[A developing story... more analysis, riding in on piggy-back, is on the way...]

Amazon Moves To HTML5/CSS3 For New Kindle, Leaves Mobi Format Behind

Richard Fink — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:50:10 +0000

Some folks I know are waiting for E-Pub to magically arrive and provide a comfy transition from print to screen. But anybody who’s looked into that closely knows it’s a fairy tale.

Ain’t gonna happen, and here’s the latest nail in the E-pub coffin:

Kindle Format 8

The List of Features Includes @Font-Face

Here’s a list of supported features on the way:
List of supported HTML tags and CSS elements

(Note to Amazon: It’s HTML Elements (but I’ll accept “tags”) but definitely not “CSS elements” CSS Properties, it is.)

Waving Goodbye To Adobe InDesign

Richard Fink — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:27:28 +0000

Something feels different about this year. Borders bookstore is widely expected to file for bankruptcy and it’s hard not to read an end-of-an-era symbolism into that. Clay Shirky reports that the newspaper industry has, perhaps, finally come to grips with the idea that the web is not just another business avenue but a discontinuity that makes much of what they have always done, irrelevant.

In publishing software, John Hudson, type designer, linguist, and invited expert to the W3C Fonts Working Group reports on Typophile:

The CSS3 font spec support for layout features is significantly more advanced than that provided in most word processing apps and in some respects even more advanced than that in InDesign. The nightly test builds of FireFox 4.0 already provide support for more OTL features than InDesign, both through higher level feature functions defined in CSS and through direct access to font-specific features (meaning that even custom layout features can be accessed).

Write Once, Print Anywhere

One of the things that kept browsers away from functioning as traditional “Desktop Publishing” apps was the need to install your font of choice in the operating system.
Web Fonts broke through this barrier. And the field is clear.

It’s just a question of time. And it will not make a difference if InDesign remains in other ways more sophisticated. If only for one simple reason: the browser is jacked into the network natively and InDesign isn’t.
And it’s about the network, not how pretty the printed output is. People will make adjustments in their expectations in return for the efficiencies. (Lately, the print quality of the books I’ve bought sucks anyway. How about you?)

Seems the “Browser As DTP App” idea is finally on the radar.
David Berlow writes:

Based on that big thing — that @font-face… — 2011 appears to be shaping up as the year browsers begin seriously taking over all the work of typesetting, for both print and the web.

I won’t happen overnight, but: Exit the Compositor, Enter the CSS Stylist. Better start buying Eric Meyer’s books now. You can’t say you weren’t told.

Web Font Follies

Richard Fink — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:10:22 +0000

I freely admit that typographic subtleties like Old-Style Numerals and Swashes don’t send a tickle up my leg. I’m not alone in that. Most web devs wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about those things even if they knew what they were. I asked one web developer if a font with just the Latin-1 characters was okay and he said, “I don’t think so, the site is for a Presbyterian organization.”
And kerning? Don’t get me started… text on the web got by without kerning for fifteen years and all it’s done is grow, grow, grow. Kerning could be bad mojo. Why take chances?

The Web Font Revolution Is Just Beginning

Stephen Coles, formerly of FontShop recently wrote a blog post titled The Webfont Revolution Is Over, Let the Evolution Begin that left me with the feeling that somebody I know needs a good kick in the rebuttal department. Now don’t get me wrong: I liked a lot of what Stephen had to say. And I’ve written similar stuff myself.
But I take issue with a few things. So here goes:

“Like Simon Daniels said so prophetically over a year ago, the war (over formats
and security and delivery) is over.

The War Over Formats And Delivery Is Not Over

Microsoft doesn’t support Data URI’s except in its own IE Fourish, boorish way. And Microsoft is, so far, enforcing the DRM embedding bits within TTF files in an attempt to cling to its cake and eat it, too.

“See? We support raw fonts just like the other browsers!”
(Except in the way we don’t.)

Opera, Safari (on Mac and now iPhone and iPad), Firefox, and Chrome all support TTF without enforcing any DRM restrictions. But in IE9 it lurks as a hidden gotcha. It will waste incalculable hours of development time as web authors go around scratching their heads wondering, “Why isn’t the font showing up in IE?” (This happens to me all the time, still. Go download a fresh copy of the open source Liberation fonts from Red Hat and see how the embedding bits are set.)
IE9 will reject those fonts.
And when the web author finds out why, it’s only a kick in Microsoft’s pants, nobody else.

When will the king stop meddling with trifles? Just when, oh when, are we finally going to put to rest the phrase, “Fucking Internet Explorer”?

“Things will get better. Display pixel density will improve. Windows users will upgrade, replacing GDI with DirectWrite. But this evolution will be slow, and we can’t do much to speed it up.

The Pace Of Change Will Speed Up, Not Slow Down

Nothing is going to move slowly where e-publishing with HTML5 is concerned. The promise of DirectWrite remains “of the future”. DirectWrite doesn’t get anybody off the hook for doing nothing about the visual quality of fonts and their usefulness to developers now, today. Why not just admit that the type industry – and I include me in that – was caught sleeping and stop making excuses?

Now, if by “evolution” it’s meant that the development and deployment of web fonts from here on in will proceed in a slow, steady, controlled, and measured pace, that will not happen. I know it’s hard to see from where and from whom the answers will come, but they will come. If there is a demand, someone will fill it. And it will be frantic. E-Publishing is about to explode and Flash as a text replacement technique is dead.

“Demand comprehensive previews that show fonts in multiple sizes in all the most common rendering environments

Don’t get me started, I said.

Bah, Humbug!

The Look That Says Book – On AListApart

Richard Fink — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:34:24 +0000

An article I wrote about Hypenation & Justification in web design was published on AListApart today. Titled: The Look That Says Book.

Please visit the comments page and weigh in on how you feel about the current level of support for hyphenation and justification in browsers.
Do you think H&J is important? Not? OK, then what? I’d like to hear what you think.

Sidenote: Editors – Wow, What A Concept!

Unfortunately, the nature of blogging is such that input from an editor just isn’t feasible except in rare instances. So it’s incredibly refreshing to work with sharp, technically astute editors like those at ALA.
Much thanks.

E-Book Publishers Go Delusional

Richard Fink — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:01:36 +0000

Book publishers seem lately like a group of prep-school kids who’ve gotten into an altercation with a bunch of gang-bangers on their way home. Pepper spray versus automatic weapons. Yeesh.

An article today in the NYTimes, E-Books Fly Beyond Mere Text, tells of publishers once again revisiting the fantasy land of “multimedia”. This latest phase, as publishers move along the Five Stages Of Grief, is bargaining:

“Maybe if we provide books with a web-like experience, we can save our jobs!”

Instead of concentrating on real problems and opportunities publishers pour resources into desperate attempts to stay relevant with a bad imitation of the web.

Newsflash: Saving your job may be a great motivator but it is not a source of opportunity. (Personally, all this reminds me of the Fashion Industry circa 1988 as the last dominoes in the migration of apparel manufacturing to low wage nations began to fall with startling speed.
Google “auto workers, Detroit” for more perspective.)

Dream On

So now publishers are coming up with “enhanced” books, “amplified” books, and “enriched” books.
No, don’t get involved. Just keep walking and call 911, it’s all you can do.

In providing this web-like experience, the operative word is “like”, as in pale imitation. No book editor on earth can “clear” enough copyrighted material to remotely come close to the depth of information I can get on the web, for free, on any facet of any book.
Look, I know they’re desperate. And as a refugee from a dead industry myself, I understand. But what world are they living in?

Aren’t any of these people aware of what happened to Microsoft Encarta?

I had heard about the plans for an “amplified” book from Penguin’s Molly Barton at the Future Of Reading Conference at RIT. The crowd at the conference was largely academic, with some librarians and publishing insiders sprinkled in. Yet even an older, relatively staid audience like that knew immediately the idea was lame.

Font designer Gary Munch deadpanned, “Uh, didn’t they try that before in the nineties?”. Such was the general reaction. To top it off, Barton made a snide comment – with pride, too – about Penguin NOT hiring web savvy “kids” to work on their e-book efforts. This raised eyebrows all around, too. Looks deceive. Beware the librarians.

We publishing professionals know best, was the message. Big mistake.

To Kindle Or Not To Kindle

Richard Fink — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:43:52 +0000

Decisions, decisions.

Today my wife the doctoral candidate asked my advice on whether to buy a book she needed as a P-Book or the Kindle edition. (We have the Kindle DX.)

The name of the book is The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. (Strangely, I remembered both the book and the author’s name. I think I might have read it a long time ago during my history-of-technology phase.)

Anyway, here were the considerations:

Delivery: Kindle is instant versus having to wait (and pay extra) for the P-Book.

Price: $9.99 for the Kindle versus $13.80 plus shipping for the P-Book.

Payment Method: Both instant – quickpay or autopay or one-click or whatever Amazon is calling it.

Intrinsic Quality: Print is print is print. Expectations will be met. There will be a Table Of Contents, there will be an Index. You can flip through it. However, there’s no equivalent to a “flip through” on the Kindle. And Kindle books can vary in quality depending upon how the digital file is created. This usually means problems navigating through the book. How widespread these problems are with Kindle books produced by commercial houses, I don’t know. But the fear flashed through my mind – and that’s a problem for both Amazon and publishers of titles for the Kindle. I wonder what the return policy is.

Miscellaneous Pros For the P-Book: You can resell it. You can loan it to a friend who doesn’t have a Kindle. It’s just as easy to scan and OCR parts of it as it is to try and copy and paste from the Kindle. (Can that even be done? …gotta work on my Kindle-skills.)

Miscellaneous Pros For the Kindle Edition: Nothing to carry, it travels with the device. It also travels with the iPad via the Kindle app. Is there a desktop version of the Kindle app? I don’t know.

Bottom Line: This book is a must-have, not discretionary. (The local library could, in this instance, be an option since the course requiring it won’t last forever.)
But on the logic of, “Well, ten bucks more or less isn’t going to break me”, the Kindle edition won. Later today, I’ll check out the quality issues and report back.

Transitions, transitions.

[ UPDATE: A Few Hours After First Post ]

The book indeed has a table of contents. However, when you first “open” the book on the Kindle, for some reason it jumps to the Preface, not the TOC. Don’t see much logic in that. Plus, who reads the damned Preface anyway. I know the author is grateful to their family, to God, and to that first-grade teacher who put them on the path to authorship. There should be a “Start Reading” option that takes you straight to the meat. Or, start with the TOC, for heaven’s sake. But anyway….

Part of the reason for this post was to display, unashamedly, my own ignorance of what’s up with Kindle books. From what I can see, the best thing about the Kindle is the iPad Kindle app. Much, much more usable. And in Naples, Florida, where I live, it’s too damned hot in the sun, anyway.
In a comment on this post, Joe Golton of FilterJoe, who’s not ignorant says:

“Richard – You’ve already pulled the trigger on this one but there’s a few things that would be helpful for you to know before purchasing any more books from the Kindle store:

1) There IS a way to flip through a book, but only if the book is formatted with “waypoints.” Waypoints are the little dots you see at the bottom of the Kindle’s screen for books that have them. Look at the Kindle DX User’s Guide for an example. Just flick the controller to the right (or left) flip forward (or backward) through the book chapter by chapter.

2) You can usually download a sample to see if the book has Table of Contents and waypoints enabled. You will want to do this for any book that has chapters, to see if it is set up to take full advantage of the Kindle formatting.

3) Nonetheless – a sample will usually only show you the first 5% or so of a book. So you may not get to preview whether graphs were done correctly.

The Nook from Barnes and Noble has the advantage of allowing you to browse the entire book while you are in the Barnes and Noble store. The Nook also has another “flip through the book” option – a slider that can be used on the touchpad to jump to different parts of the book.”

So there you have it. And me, too.