Policy proposal

[Daniel Strebe]

Colleagues:

I append my proposal for a policy to guide our development of the composite font specification. I suggest we approve or reject this proposal before our next conference call so that we can make progress. If you wish to object or amend, please act swiftly.

 - Regards,

daan Strebe
Senior Computer Scientist
Adobe Systems Incorporated

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The committee is the ad hoc committee that created the composite font specification.
Recipe is the instructions contained in the composite font.
Creator is the party who creates the recipe.
Consumer is the party who interprets and deploys the recipe.
Component font is a non-composite font referred to by a recipe.

The committee acknowledges these realities:

* Intentions of creators are diverse
* Needs of consumers are diverse
* Sophistication of consumers varies
* Deployment environments are diverse
* Controlled environments need less explicit state than public environments
* Component fonts cannot be required to travel with the recipe
     Therefore component fonts can be expected to be missing or misidentified
     Therefore contingency processing is normal
* What a recipe does not say can deliberately signal freedoms to the consumer
* The availability of composite fonts is not likely to persuade consumers to take on component font formats they do not already support.
* Mandating details in a recipe that are spurious to the creator's intentions will result in creators making recipes of poor quality.
* Mandating details in a recipe that are spurious to consumers' needs will curb the desire of consumers to support composite fonts.
* The committee cannot anticipate all intentions and needs for composite fonts.

Therefore the committee cannot realistically be in the business of arbitrating what gets said in any specific recipe, but only how it gets said. The committee divides up responsibility as follows:

Composite font specification:
    Provides a grammar of communication between creator and consumer.
Creator:
    Expresses intent for a composite font by using this grammar.
Consumer:
    Honors the recipe's intent insofar as intent is expressed and insofar as the consumer can honor it, but is otherwise free to enact the consumer's agenda.

The creator constructs its recipe through a principle of elective detail: The creator need express only those details relevant to its agenda. A minimal recipe, for example, only declares a single component font and nothing else. A highly specified recipe might declare:
     Many component fonts and their versions, each ensured by computed fingerprint;
     Unicode ranges associated with each;
     Languages associated with each;
     Relative baselines for the component fonts, per language;
     Font-wide metrics per language
A consumer is not obliged to support all defined functionality, but merely to be able to parse the grammar,  pluck out what it understands, and act on it.

[end]
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