Apple Spliced Font Format

[James Cloos]

[Forgot to set the from to the address I'm subscribed as; resending.... -JimC]

Looking at the DTD, I see that it is quite verbose -- as shown by
elements such as:

         <language language="en"/>

but the Name element's type attribute is numeric (based on ids in OFF).
It seems like it would be more consistant to use something like:

   <Name type="FullName" string="Symbol" language="en"/>

or, in keeping with <language/>, even:

   <Name type="FullName" name="Symbol" language="en"/>

than:

   <Name type="4" string="Symbol" language="en"/>

Using the type's name rather than a number will help make the files
self-documenting.  It would also help make an RNG schema both self-
documenting and more able to fully validate an instance.

AFAICT, the member fonts are specified only by the name attribute of the
ComponentDef element.  But the cmapOverride maps characters to glyph IDs.
The problem with that is that glyph ids can change between different
versions of a font.  Either the cmap overrides need to be done in a way
which supports that, or the xml needs to be able to document for which
version(s) of the component fonts that version of the xml file is designed.

I hope that and RNG schema will be part of the standard, not just a DTD,
as the provie for better validation, verification and analysis of sgml/xml.

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6