In article <ajmo29$r...@ripley.netscape.com>,

As for many other things, there are open bugs about downloadable fonts
(bug 70132, bug 41250, bug 55194). However, as with many other things,
that doesn't automatically mean that there were any concrete plans about
doing something.

Speculation (just my speculation--not necessarily the opinion of the bug
assignees):

I wouldn't expect Mozilla to get support for downloadable/embedded fonts
of any kind any time soon (if ever).

When Netscape and Bitstream implemented PFR support for Netscape 4.x and
when Microsoft implemented TrueType downloading for IE, many people
thought that the lack of PDF-style font embedding was a real defect of
HTML and that it was vitally important for designers to be able to
transmit their pixel-wise "vision" to the reader.

But do we see embedded fonts being used on notable American and Western
European sites? No. The problems (including download times and copyright
matters) associated with the concept outweigh the marginal benefit of
being able to use a font that the user doesn't already have installed.

Embedded fonts are actually used on sites written in languages that have
been in the past been neglected by browser makers. These sites (for
example some Indian sites) code the text in Latin gibberish and then use
a font that to the computer seems to be a Latin font but has eg.
Devanagari glyphs, so that when the Latin gibberish is rendered with the
font it seems to a human reader to be intelligible text in some
language. The same approach has been also been used for including Greek
letters as math symbols in otherwise Latin-based text.

Obviously, that kind of ad hockery falls apart when Unicode-savvy
browsers come along and render Latin gibberish as Latin gibberish (since
that's what is coded in the file from the Unicode point of view). That's
why the people who one would think to be most in the need of Unicode
support sometimes actually complain about Mozilla's Unicode support.

A *lot* of work has been put into Mozilla's Unicode support. Supporting
downloadable fonts in a cross-platform way would also be a *lot* of work
and would potentially require navigating past a bunch of patents but the
rewards would be small. For the purpose of rendering non-ISO-8859-1
characters Mozilla already provides Unicode support that, in the long
run, is a lot better approach than using pseudo-Latin downloadable fonts.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivo...@niksula.hut.fi
http://www.hut.fi/u/hsivonen/