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

[John Hudson]

I'm beginning to think that two levels of information might beneficially 
be indicated using the kind of tagging in this proposal. I can think of 
plenty of fonts in which the information of interest is script rather 
than language, e.g. an Indic font that contains a Latin 8-bit subset for 
purely technical reasons and that is not intended to be used to set 
Latin-script text. In that case, one would want to be able to indicate 
that e.g. the Devanagari script is the intended use, not particular 
languages using that script. The latter might be secondary information 
if, e.g. a font is particularly intended for Marathi and not suitable 
for Hindi.

As I understand it, the BCP 47 language tags include provision for 
indicating script, but only as a secondary indicator applied to a 
language tag, e.g.

       zh-Hant (Chinese written in Traditional Chinese script)
       zh-Hans (Chinese written in Simplified Chinese script)

And for font tagging purposes this is backwards: the first -- and often 
only -- indicator of intention needed is a script tag. This suggests to 
me a hierarchy of script and language.

Now, this might suggest something like Adam's proposed use of existing 
OTL tags to indicate intention, only in this case the script and 
language system tags. I don't think this works though, because I 
regularly include Latin kerning and other features appropriate to the 
character set in fonts that happen to include a Latin subset, even 
though the font is not intended for setting Latin-script text, and hence 
have a <latn> OTL feature tree in the font. After all, even if a font is 
not intended for setting text in a Latin-script language, the occasional 
untransliterated English word may occur within e.g. Hindi text, and 
should be properly displayed with appropriate kerning. Also, the OTL 
language system tags indicate something other than language (what I 
would call -- to use terminology in a way similar to Martin -- 
particular writing systems whose characteristic differ from the defaults 
of an individual font's behaviour). And, of course, the OTL language 
system tags, other than <dflt>, indicate exceptions rather than intentions.

So I think a tagging system to indicate intentions is a good idea, but 
think it needs to provide for both script and language. It should 
definitely be possible to tag a script or scripts as intended use, 
without needing to tag any languages. I'm leaning towards requesting 
some kind of hierarchical model, because I can imagine wanting to 
indicate something like this:

	Latin
	Cyrillic
	 - Bosnian

Of course, Bosnian can be written in the Latin script too, but a font 
wouldn't necessarily need to indicate specific support for this, since 
the required characters and glyphs wouldn't differ from norms for any 
other languages, while the Cyrillic requirements might.


JH


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