FW: [mpeg-OTspec] RE: Proposed changes to the OFF specification

[John Hudson]

David Lemon wrote:

> Greg is right, of course; the engines are conformant with the spec, and 
> the fonts are not. (I'll observe that it would be possible to make the 
> spec a lot clearer on this point, which would be a good thing.) This is 
> an unfortunate mismatch. The good news is that it's not a calamity. I 
> don't know about GDI, but Adobe's engines look at only one or two values 
> (depending on the engine), and to the best of my knowledge haven't 
> triggered any complaints to date.

Given just how many fonts there are out there with incorrectly set 
Panose values even within the set that conforms to the OT spec, I'm 
surprised that any software hopes to rely on Panose for anything. If you 
took a poll of font makers, I doubt if you will find many that actually 
do the work of calculating correct values according to the Panose spec: 
most either ignore this part of the OS/2 table completely, using 
FontLab's default settings for all fonts, or set the values of 'Any' for 
all fields, or try to guess at values based on the misleading naming 
that Panose uses.

JH


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