[mpeg-OTspec] Draft amendment of ISO/IEC 14496-22 OFF (3rd edition)

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

On Wednesday, June 03, 2015 12:52 PM John Hudson wrote:
Vlad wrote:

> > I agree and share your point of view but I also understand Behdad’s
> > position and his desire to enable font tools make intelligent 
> > decisions that are not in any way limited by today’s prescriptions 
> > that might get outdated at some point in the near (or distant) future.

> > So considering both of these views – I’d propose that we should 
> > specifically mention the unique role that ‘name’ table plays in a font 
> > collection (serving as a unique identifier attached to a font 
> > component) and also explicitly mention that any other tables can be 
> > shared and the decision to do so is based solely on the design 
> > decisions applied to font components and font collections that include them.

> This sounds reasonable, but I would like to see such comments reference 'current 
> font collection implementations' or perhaps a specific version of the format spec. 
> When considering possible models for packaging size-specific design variants a couple 
> of years ago, one option I examined would have involved a new kind of TTC in which 
> the unique identifier would have been a size reference rather than a name reference. 
> This wasn't pursued, but I offer it as evidence that there are other ways of thinking 
> about font collections, and hence possible future innovations in this area.

When I mentioned 'name' table as a unique identifier I didn't specifically consider "font name" to be the one, but rather a collection of Name IDs. Your comment about optical size reference being the only differentiator in a font collection is valid and relevant and it actually brings back the question that was once posed on this list a couple of months ago when Karsten Luecke (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/mpeg-OTspec/conversations/messages/1281) proposed to introduce new Name IDs for size-aware font definitions. That discussion didn’t yield an agreement, but since this same question was raised more than once by now I am wondering if we can actually get to a consensus decision on this in time for this amendment to be started.

Thank you,
Vladimir