Panose issue status? (Re: [mpeg-OTspec] AHG activity kick-off)

[John Hudson]

ichelle Perham wrote:

> We’ve had a bit more time to investigate this issue further. Considering
> the fact that the majority of the new implementations are based on
> Panose 1.5 – Microsoft agrees with the proposal to remove Panose 1.0
> values from OS/2 description and simply reference the 1.5 spec as is.

If the version of the Panose 1.5 spec hosted by Monotype Imaging at 
http://panose.com/ is to be the normative reference, then some text 
encoding bugs on that site need to be fixed. These bugs occur in lists 
such as this one:

	0-Any
	1-No fit
	2- Very Light …………………WeightRat ³ 35
	3-Light………………… 18 £WeightRat < 35
	4-Thin……………………10 £WeightRat < 18
	5-Book ………………….7.5 £; WeightRat < 10
	6-Medium……………….5.5 £WeightRat < 7.5
	7-Demi ………………….4.5 £; WeightRat < 5.5
	8-Bold …………………..3.5 £; WeightRat < 4.5
	9-Heavy………………… 2.5 £; WeightRat < 3.5
	10-Black………………… 2.0 £; WeightRat < 2.5
	11-Extra Black………………… WeightRat < 2.0

Personally, even presuming the encoding is fixed, I think the selections 
would be clearer if presented in English sentences, e.g.

	6-Medium……………… WeightRat greater than 5.5 but less than 7.5


JH


PS. On the subject of Panose and Monotype, as I recall from a conference 
conversation many years ago Monotype developed a tool for automatically 
generating correct Panose values for fonts (I believe Dave Opstad coded 
it). Since having accurate Panose information in fonts is of general 
ecological benefit, I wonder if Monotype might be interested in open 
sourcing or otherwise making that tool available?



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