Web Fonts

[Koontz John E]

Those who are interested in the possibility of using the Standard Siouan
fonts on the Web might wish to look at page:

http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/pfrtest/pfr.htm

This points to a simple page with links to four test (readme) pages.

This is distinctly a first pass at approaching this problem using the
Bitstream Portable Font Resource approach.  PFR files are created with the
Bitstream WebFont Wizzard, see

http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/webfonttools/webfontmaker/index.html

I am using a 10 fonts or 10 days (whichever comes first) trial version of
the WebFont Wizzard, and I've made four fonts, for the four variants
(roman, bold roman, italic, and bold italic) of SSDoulos (Standard Siouan
Doulos, or proportional serifed). Both the pfr files and the readme pages
were generated by the Wizzard.

The Bitstream PFR approach is supposed to work for both Netscape and MS
Internet Explorer browsers.  Netscape supports it natively; MSIE requires
some assistance from the server to get the relevant tools downloaded into
your browser.  I'm not sure if that assistance is actually there inCU's
web server for spot.colorado.edu, but I'm seeing Siouanist characters
using MSIE 5.5 under Windows 98.  I'm not sure what you'll see.

If you are interested in looking at these pages and want to report back, I
suggest reporting directly to me at john.koontz at colorado.edu, as not
everyone on the list will be interested in a lot of traffic on this.  I
will naturally summarize things later.

Note that in generating these files I renamed the SSDoulosRoman* set from
my original poor choice of StandardSiouan*.  Also, the Wizzard tries to
get you to limit the fonts to particular URL venues in case you feel
proprietary.  I've tried to circumvent this by assigning them to http: and
https:, which should cover just about anything (or not work at all).  This
is only relevant if you want to snag the files and try to use them
yourselves, of course.  This is fine with me, and, as far as I know, SIL,
too.  The fonts were made with the SIL TrueType Font Foundary tool.

Note also that the Bitstream site suggests that you have the Windows font
smoothing add-on (free) installed.  Check the Bitstream site for
information.

The initial page was somewhat slow in coming up.

If all goes well, I will try to convert the other Siouanist fonts, though
I'll need to buy the full version of the software to go much further!
The users don't need to purchase anything, but may have to put up with
various nuisances as yet unsuspected ...

John Koontz