[mpeg-OTspec] Re: [OpenType] MS Proposal for a new Name Table ID

[Bob Hallissy]

I agree that this kind of info could be extraordinarily helpful... but 
I'm wondering if a simple list of language IDs is sufficient?  I think 
the problem is more complicated than that, and we may need to step back 
a bit and figure out what info is really needed. The following is a bit 
more "thinking out loud"...

Broad-spectrum fonts like Times New Roman or Charis SIL highlight some 
unique issues:

- They support many hundreds of languages. Enumerating the list for such 
fonts will be the first challenge. Moreover, the design of a data 
structure to hold the resulting list needs to accommodate hundreds of 
entries with reasonable expectations on client searching.

- What if certain OT features have to be enabled for the font to render 
language-appropriate shapes?  (IMO the 'locl' feature is currently 
insufficient as it depends on OT language tags which are incomplete for 
the 6900 languages of the world.)

- The growth (and convergence) of web-font and mobile technologies has 
resulted in a growing interest dynamic font subsetting. This is related 
to the subject issue because both involve a prior problem: knowing what 
characters are needed to support a given language.  I wonder if we 
shouldn't be focusing on how to populate and utilize something like CLDR 
Exemplar data 
<http://cldr.unicode.org/translation/characters#TOC-Exemplar-Characters> 
-- then fonts might not have to explicitly list what languages they 
support (except for the problem of language-specific shaping).

Like I said, I think the problem is more complicated....

Bob Hallissy


On 2013-01-04 at 8:45 Ken Lunde wrote:
> Regardless of where this information goes, it is important and useful, because implementations are currently forced to employ heuristics to arrive at this information, such as 'OS/2' table settings, Unicode ranges in the 'cmap' table, the language settings for existing 'name' table strings, and so on. Explicitly stating the intended language (or languages) of the font resource, or even the converse, is extraordinarily helpful.

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