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

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

FYI

-----Original Message-----
From: listmaster at indx.co.uk [mailto:listmaster at indx.co.uk] On Behalf Of Jelle Bosma 
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 5:32 AM
To: "multiple recipients of OpenType"@mail.indx.co.uk
Subject: Re: [mpeg-OTspec] Re: [OpenType] MS Proposal for a new Name Table ID

Message from OpenType list:



Op 7-jan-2013, om 19:58 heeft John H. Jenkins het volgende geschreven:

> The problem with a bitarray is that we would quickly run into the same 
> problem we've already got with the 'OS/2' table: you run out of bits.


Hi John,

How many scripts are there, that are used by several languages, where the appearance of the script has to be different depending on the language? There are of course the Han ideographs, where this is a real issue.

I do not think this applies to Latin. I am not aware that there are certain languages that are so particular about the style of a font that you need to protect them from certain fonts. Having had a look at the IETF language tags: would we really expect type designers to add a tag for every possible language a Latin font does support?  
There are about 30 entries for variants of English alone! It may not be a good idea to use a Black Letter font to display Haitian Creole, or Freestyle Script for a theological essay, but we have Panose numbers for that.

There may be non-Latin fonts with poorly designed Latin. But there are also Latin fonts with poorly designed Latin, so that is not a criteria. When using font substitution, it seems a bad idea to use a CJK font to display purely Latin, Greek or Cyrillic text. But you do not need language tags to build a software system that avoids using CJK fonts when substituting for Latin, Greek or Cyrillic.

How many other multi-language scripts are there where this is an issue? We are not talking ancient scripts and dead languages I presume.

I can think of Devanagari, where a font designed for Sanskrit scholars may have ligatures not expected in Hindi and other languages. But Sanskrit is in the dead languages category. I guess for Devanagari there are the different shapes that may have to be used for Nepali. That is 1 extra bit. Although Marathi has a few shape variants, using the Hindi forms doesn't seem to be that much of a problem. Maybe a second bit. The shape differences between Bengali and Assamese use separate Unicodes.

There might be shape differences in Serbian Cyrillic. That is the third bit.

What multi language scripts with shape variants am I missing, that we risk running out of bits?

Best regards,
   Jelle





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