[mpeg-OTspec] Mac version string in 'name' table

[Peter Constable]

Thanks, Ken.

Judy in our Fonts team has told me that she got reports of developers that have licensed some of our fonts having issues in Adobe XD running on Mac OS when the fonts didn’t include names for platform ID 1: 3/1 strings were being used, but for the incorrect language. (May have been an app issue or a MacOS/iOS issue.) You may want to consult with your XD team before dropping platform 1 strings.

(Maybe someday all the legacy platform-specific stuff can go away and we just have platform-independent, Unicode-encoded strings.)

But that is a different issue than what is referred to in the spec currently. I’m inclined to delete that and to add (somewhere appropriate) something like this:

“Note: Some applications running on Apple platforms may require a font to contain strings for the Macintosh platform (platform ID 1).”

Or perhaps,

“Note: Newer platform implementations are able to use strings for other platforms. Some applications running on a given platform, however, may still require that fonts include strings for that platform.”


Peter

From: mpeg-OTspec at yahoogroups.com <mpeg-OTspec at yahoogroups.com> On Behalf Of Ken Lunde lunde at adobe.com [mpeg-OTspec]
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2018 3:32 PM
To: opentype-list at indx.co.uk; mpeg-OTspec at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [mpeg-OTspec] Mac version string in 'name' table



Peter,

I am not sure whether this is an answer to your question, but we (meaning Adobe) have deployed several typeface families whose fonts completely lack Macintosh 'name' table strings, such as Source Han Serif (to include the Google-branded Noto Serif CJK), Ten Mincho (貂明朝), and a non-zero number of open source test fonts. We added the ability of our tools to omit these strings over two years ago, and I briefly wrote about it here:

https://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/2015/11/whats-in-a-name-table.html

We have not received any reports whatsoever that would suggest that we would need to add Macintosh 'name' table strings to these fonts. When Source Han Sans (and Noto Sans CJK) Version 2.000 is released later this year, I fully intend to remove their Macintosh 'name' table strings.

Regards...

-- Ken

> On Feb 18, 2018, at 12:17 PM, Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com<mailto:petercon at microsoft.com> [mpeg-OTspec] <mpeg-OTspec-noreply at yahoogroups.com<mailto:mpeg-OTspec-noreply at yahoogroups.com>> wrote:
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> This gem dates at least as far back as October 2002/OT 1.4:
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> “For historical reasons, some applications which install fonts perform version control using Macintosh platform (platform ID 1) strings from the 'name' table. Because of this, we strongly recommend that the 'name' table of all fonts include Macintosh platform strings and that the syntax of the version number (name id 5) follows the guidelines given in this document.”
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> Is anyone aware of software that still requires the Mac platform version string to do version checking?
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> Peter
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