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    Typekit gets some backing
    Thursday, June 25, 2009
    Typekit, hmmm, I was pretty harsh on it on Twitter. But when a venture capital company who have put money into the likes of Meebo and Automattic gets involved and throws some cash about, you have to wonder if they know something about how the foundries are reacting behind the scenes. The press release is a little bit weasly-worded (in fairness, it’s a press release), and I can’t quite work out if it’s just True Ventures that is the investor, or a set of investors of which True Ventures happens to be the largest, but it’s namedropping like crazy.

    Will the foundries support it? Will every page that features Webkit type require a request to a separate server, possibly introducing the same sort of network instability that web advertising can cause? How gracefully will pages inevitably degrade on IE? How will it deal with font rendering differences between OS platforms and browsers? How does the licensing, from a technical standpoint, work, and what happens if someone hacks my server, or my IP addresses change? How does it all fit with accessibility features and, more importantly, related law? What about typeface revisions, metric changes, OpenType support, character set encoding, multiple language support? What about safegards on readability or degradation on hairlines? Is this a one-off fee, or a subscription model that makes my archive content eternally drain money? With none of these questions answered, as far as I can see, it is hard to get over-excited and jump up and down like a ickle puppy, barking and possibly weeing myself, yet still maintaining a veneer of adorability. Of course I want nice type on the web (providing it is optimised for onscreen use), but I need more than a cocktease.



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