Proposal for new name table ID: "Trade name"

[Adam Twardoch (List)]

Hello OTspec list members,

Realizing that this may make certain things even more complex, I'd like 
to propose a 4th "family name" field to the "name" table.

Currently, we have:
ID 1: "Windows family name" or "Styling group name" with up to 4 members
ID 21: "WWS family name" where each member must differ in weight, width 
and slope
ID 16: "Preferred family name" or "Typographic family name" with no 
particular limitations

While the limitations of ID 1 and ID 21 are quite clear, ID 16 has been 
the type designers' and font vendors' favorite choice when it comes to 
packaging many styles under one menu name. However, even that name has 
not been prone to limitations.

In particular, many font vendors have decided to release editions of 
their families which differ in outline flavor and/or character set under 
different Preferred family names.

For example, FontFont has released their FF Good family with the 
following IDs 16:
* "Good Pro" in CFF flavor with Latin extended and Cyrillic character set
* "Good OT" in CFF flavor with basic Latin character set
* "Good Offc Pro" in TTF flavor with Latin extended and Cyrillic 
character set
* "Good Offc" in TTF flavor with basic Latin character set
* "Good SC Offc Pro" in TTF flavor with Latin ext and Cyrillic charsets 
with small-caps in place of lowercase
* "Good SC Offc" in TTF flavor with basic Latin charsets with small-caps 
in place of lowercase
* "Good Head Pro" in CFF flavor with Latin extended and Cyrillic 
character set in headline style
* "Good Head OT" in CFF flavor with basic character set in headline style
* "Good Head Offc Pro" in TTF flavor with Latin extended and Cyrillic 
charsets in headline style
* "Good Head Offc" in TTF flavor with basic Latin charset in headline style
* "Good Head SC Offc Pro" in TTF flavor with Latin ext and Cyrillic 
charsets in headline style and small-caps in place of lowercase
* "Good Head SC Offc" in TTF flavor with basic Latin charsets in 
headline style and small-caps in place of lowercase

That makes 12 separate Preferred families consisting of a total of 360 
fonts. We can clearly see that in addition to the trade family name 
("Good"), the Preferred family entries contain a lot of identifiers of 
technical or design nature: optical size ("Head"), character set ("Pro" 
vs. "OT" or none, plus "SC"), outline flavor ("Pro" and "OT" vs. "Offc 
Pro" and "Offc").

It feels quite natural that there should be an additional name ID which 
would allow FontFont to just write "Good" for all those fonts.

Other font vendors follow a similar pattern, even with less extensive 
families.

Also, we observe the habit of releasing "superfamilies" such as:
* "Frutiger", "Frutiger Neue" and "Frutiger Serif"
* "ITC Stone Serif", "ITC Stone Sans", "ITC Stone Humanist" and "ITC 
Stone Informal"
* "Museo", "Museo Sans", "Museo Sans Rounded"
and many many others.

In all such cases, the trade name used by the foundry is typically the 
common denominator of the name IDs 16, e.g. "Frutiger", "ITC Stone" or 
"Museo".

Therefore, I propose the creation of a new "Trade name" name ID, where 
font vendors would be able to enter the most-encompassing, most generic 
trade name under which all the various variants of fonts could be 
united, regardless of their outline flavor, optical size, serif 
treatment, character set or other technical aspects.

While I wouldn't recommend that this field be exposed in any 
"traditional" desktop applications, I think this field could be used 
nicely to organized larger collections of fonts. For example, a desktop 
font manager application such as Monotype Font Explorer X or Extensis 
Suitcase could use it to group various related fonts. Also, online font 
distributors such as MyFonts or FontShop, or webfont service platforms 
such as Google Fonts or Fonts.com could utilize this field to unify all 
font variants for a given family on one page.

This field would be helpful if a foundry creates a custom edition of a 
font for corporate clients (often with a special suffix in the Preferred 
family name), or if some subsetted version of a font needs to be created 
(common in the webfont world) -- this new name ID could stay intact.

Finally, this field could allow font foundries to enter their 
trademarked name verbatim into the field. The existing name ID 7 
(Trademark) is typically filled with an entire sentence including "...is 
a trademark of..." -- but it would be useful to have a machine-readable 
"isolated" version of the trademarked name inside of the font file as well.

I'll appreciate your thoughts, comments,

Best,
Adam

-- 

May success attend your efforts,
-- Adam Twardoch
(Remove "list." from e-mail address to contact me directly.)