[mpeg-OTspec] Proposed changes to the OFF specification

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

On Tuesday, July 05, 2011 5:52 PM James Cloos wrote:
> 
> It seems that dropping the panose info would make accurate
> classification not more likely but rather less likely.
> 

Agree, but I don't think dropping Panose is what's been proposed. The proposal (read the last sentence of the section entitled "Discussion in SC34") is to keep Panose as the classification system, but to drop the actual property names from the OS/2 spec and to reference the Panose specification to define them. As of today (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/os2.htm#pan), the property names listed in the OS/2 table description only mention properties that are defined in Section 2 of Panose spec for Latin text. Other sections (3 - 5) of Panose use the same 10 byte arrays but define slightly different set of properties.
 
> Even if the original authors of panose did not envision certain
> combinations, that does not imply that those combinations are
> useless.
> 

Right, and the liaison also seem to emphasize it when they refer to a specific [international] descriptor of the Panose field that says that "Additional specifications are required for PANOSE to classify non-Latin character sets".

I wonder if Suzuki-san (copied on this email) may be able to offer more details about this liaison and whether my understanding of the proposal is correct.

Thank you,
Vladimir