New Salem ...

Copied from bulletin board in the employees' break room at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site:

The underlying purpose of the restoration of New Salem, Lincoln's early home, is not to make a show place but to provide a lesson to the people in the common virtues and true principles of life.

-- Illinois State Journal, May 9, 1926

COMM 207, 317

An article in Slate.com on new type display software that lets users download fonts for display on their own computers so they can see a webpage displayed in the fonts for which it was designed. Sounds good, huh? Explains Farhad Manjoo, Slate's tech reporter:

The strange reality of the Web is that it's harder to display a novel font than it is to embed a video. In this realm, at least, print media are still way ahead. Flip open your favorite glossy magazine and behold the typographic bounty—the text sizes that range from the microscopic to the gargantuan, the huge variety of font weights and styles, and the thrillingly large universe of different typefaces. Compared with the typical issue of Cosmo, Slate and every other online magazine look like something out of the 1800s.

The new software, called Typekit, would change that. Manjoo adds:

Now, most major browsers—including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera—recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. ...

If you didn't jump out of your chair and run around the block, you're probably not that into typography. But trust me—that ... is revolutionary. While certain browsers allowed font embedding before, there's never been a standard implementation that worked across the entire Web. As a result, Web designers have always been restricted to using the few fonts that they know were already installed on most people's computers. That's why most pages reach for Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, and Times New Roman, the fonts that ship with the Windows or Mac operating systems. With @font-face, we'll finally see custom fonts on the Web—fonts designed to convey a specific tone or emotion, to create distinctive publications or styles, just like in print.

But it's too early to break out the champagne. Most type faces (which we loosely call "fonts" in Web design) are proprietary. That means they belong to somebody, they have value and it's considered a form of intellectual property theft to use them without paying their owners. Typekit may have a way around this. Manjoo:

Think of Typekit as the iTunes Store for fonts. If you're looking for a cool font to include on your site, you'd go to Typekit and browse through its menu—the company has already made deals with dozens of foundries and plans to have several more in place by the time it launches later this summer. Depending on the fonts you choose or the size of your Web site, you'd either get your fonts for free or pay a subscription fee for access. (The company hasn't yet decided what it will charge for its different subscription tiers.) Typekit will give you a bit of code to add to your Web page; then, you'll be able to adorn your site with legal typefaces as easily as you can pictures, videos, and GIF animations of dancing cats. The fonts will work automatically in new browsers; you won't have to download a plug-in or do anything else to see them. If you have an old browser, or if you stop paying the fee, you'll see a default typeface.

Which means more Arial and Times Roman after all.