From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Mon Nov 24 2008 - 11:45:47 CST
philip chastney wrote:
> using OpenType tables brings lots of benefits to the font, but
> drastically restricts the software it can be used with
Can you expand on this? From my perspective, OT Layout support looks
pretty good in most places, the most notable weaknesses being in Apple's
support, but they are working on improving that. What do you consider
'drastic restrictions'?
> I should have said "the average designer of large fonts", because I get
> the impression that the "average" font designer still finds the full
> extent of Latin-1 a bit exotic
Those would be below-average font developers. As of about five years
ago, most of the type designers I know have gravitated to a pan-European
Latin set, with a few extending to Cyrillic and Greek.
Support for combining marks remains minimal, though, in large part
because of the heritage of 8-bit sets with all precomposed diacritics.
If we hadn't been able to get away without supporting combining marks
for so long, our tools and workflows would be much more advanced than
they are.
> but with that change, I still think that the average designer of large
> fonts will want their font to be useful in as many contexts as possible,
> and will therefore generate as many pre-formed composites as possible
But those pre-formed composites need to be accessed by some mechanism
other than straight glyph-to-character mapping, since many will not have
precomposed encodings in Unicode. So you still need OpenType Layout GSUB
support, even if you don't think you can rely on GPOS support. I wonder
what are the current holes in OTL support, such that the GSUB <ccmp>
feature is supported but the GPOS <mark> and <mkmk> are not? Are these
holes big enough -- and unlikely to be soon filled in -- to encourage
font developers to add thousands of precomposed glyphs to their fonts?
I'm not keen on the idea, because I'd really like to reduce glyph set
sizes, not increase them.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com You can't build a healthy democracy with people who believe in little green men from Venus. -- Arthur C. Clark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 24 2008 - 11:49:07 CST