[mpeg-OTspec] Re: [OpenType] More than 20 Stylistic Sets!

[Ken Lunde]

Thomas,

With regard to your trivia statement, that is easily remedied by registering 'ss00' and 'cv00' at the same time as registering 'ss21' through 'ss99'. ;-)

Regards...

-- Ken

> On Mar 20, 2019, at 3:47 PM, Thomas Phinney tphinney at cal.berkeley.edu [mpeg-OTspec] <mpeg-OTspec-noreply at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Back at the time, Adobe (represented in the discussions by me and David Lemon) was in favor of doing ss01-99, and Microsoft objected—for much the reasons John suggests.
> 
> Of course, that was 15 years ago, and thinking may have evolved. I remain in favor of allowing up to 99. If not all apps can expose them all, that would be too bad, but I would rather have them in the spec, and apps encouraged to evolve their interfaces, rather than not.
> 
> Trivia: I believe you can tell that this feature was at least partly created by non-programmers, because the numbering starts at 01 instead of 00.  ;)
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 3:07 PM John Hudson john at tiro.ca [mpeg-OTspec] <mpeg-OTspec-noreply at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>  
> On 20032019 12:40 pm, Ken Lunde lunde at adobe.com [mpeg-OTspec] wrote:
> > At this point, based on the discussions thus far, I doubt that anyone 
> > can provide a convincing argument against registering 'ss21' through 
> > 'ss99' as additional Stylistic Set features. 
> 
> Well...
> 
> The original intention of the Stylistic Set features was to provide 
> access for coordinated sets of design variants of complete or 
> significant portions of a character subset, e.g. all lowercase letters, 
> grouped by shared style. The initial use case was the OpenType-ification 
> of the Poetica and Zapfino families, in which the stylistic sets had 
> been shipped as separate fonts in their pre-OT incarnations. The 
> decision to limit the number of Stylistic Set features to twenty was 
> influenced by a couple of factors: one was that the number of stylistic 
> sets in Poetica and Zapfino was four, so twenty seemed like quite a lot, 
> and the other was that a smaller number was more likely to get buy-in 
> from applications needing to give some kind of UI real-estate to the 
> features, possibly à la InDesign with a menu listing (I'll leave aside 
> the whole other topic of poor UI design for OpenType Layout).
> 
> What began to happen fairly soon after the Stylistic Set features were 
> registered and began to show up in applications is that font makers 
> began using them to provide access to variants of individual characters 
> instead of sets of characters, e.g. multiple variants of an ampersand, 
> each mapped to a different Stylistic Set feature. And used in this way 
> the features very quickly get used up and people start asking why there 
> aren't more.
> 
> Meanwhile, SIL registered the 0–99 Character Variant features, which not 
> only, by design, provide access to variants of individual glyphs, but 
> also recommend doing so using GSUB one-to-one-of-many lookups, rather 
> than one variant per feature. [It is technically possible, of course, to 
> build Stylistic Set feature using such lookups, but application UI for 
> these features tends only to expose the first enumerated variant.]
> 
> The Character Variant features — including enumerated variants — are 
> supported in CSS, but not in common desktop applications, and so font 
> makers have continued to use Stylistic Set features to access individual 
> character variants, and continued to complain that twenty isn't enough 
> to accommodate this use.
> 
> I don't know if this is a 'convincing argument', but it seems to me that 
> if one is going to have to ask application makers to add support for 80 
> new Stylistic Set features, why not ask them to support the existing 100 
> Character Variant features instead?
> 
> JH
> 
> -- 
> 
> John Hudson
> Tiro Typeworks Ltd  www..tiro.com
> Salish Sea, BC  tiro at tiro.com
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> “If I don’t use fancy words, you won’t know I’m an expert.”
> —Marcel Matley, document examiner
> 
>