MS Proposal for a new Name Table ID

[Michelle Perham]

As Vlad mentioned previously, the next MPEG meeting will be January 21-25 and he would like to have proposed changes finalized by January 11 to meet the deadline for document submission.

Microsoft has several small changes we'd like to propose. I'll be sending them out over the next 2 days. The first proposal is for an addition to the 'name' table. The proposal comes from Dwayne Robinson, who I've cc'd on this email. Please include him on your responses.

Justification: OpenType fonts need a way to identify their intended language usage so that scenarios like text editing can choose appropriate fonts which switching language/IME. The inadequate legacy codepage bits have been long exhausted, so I propose adding name table id 23 containing an IETF language tag (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/name.htm).

The following description would be added to the documentation table.
"Intended Language. This is the language the font was really designed for, which is not necessarily the same as character coverage. This allows distinction, for example, amongst Asian fonts as being Traditional Chinese vs Simplified Chinese vs Japanese, even though the fonts may have cmap coverage for a subset of each. All language identifiers follow the IETF format with an optional language and country and mandatory script subtag. These strings are encoded in UTF-16BE using platform ID 0, encoding ID 3, and the respective language id. Examples include "*-Jpan", "zh-Hans", "zh-Hant". If the font genuinely targets and fully supports more than one language, it will include more than one name table entry separated by commas."

Sorry to not get this out sooner! Like everyone else we've been very busy.

Happy new year!

Michelle
Microsoft Typography Group

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