How hard would it be to give us the ability to embed our own?

July 14, 2006 by Joel Rea
Especially if we needed, say, only the regular uppercase letters of a particular font, not the digits nor lowercase nor accented letters? Partial font embedding can save much space. There’s also the static font option for non-dynamic text, which stores the actual outlines. The thing is, now that Adobe owns Flash, they have a technology available that could solve this problem once and for all, but they acquired it from another company years ago and for the most part shelved it, and even bought every existing copy of the former company’s product they could find to try to wipe from the historical record all evidence that this technology even existed, since it was so devastatingly superior to Adobe’s own font technologies. But, they do own it now, so they could use it if they want. The technology is called Chameleon Fonts, from a former company called Ares FontWorks. Their FontChameleon product used these Chameleon Fonts to do things that even Adobe’s Multiple Master fonts couldn’t do, and far more efficiently! The space needed for a Chameleon font is a tiny percentage of that needed for an identical PostScript Type 1 font, because the entire font outline isn’t stored. Only the differences between that font and a special “master font” are stored! There’s more. Much more. Imagine being able to smoothly morph text in ways beyond the usual, including being able to smoothly animate the X-height, the serif thickness or length, etc., or even morph text from one font family into another, smoothly! Even fonts as different as, say, Garamond and Futura! Yes, you can actually make a font that’s 60% Garamond and 40% Futura, or any other mixture, and the next version of Flash could conceivably animate between them on-screen in real time!