Fwd: [OpenType] More than 20 Stylistic Sets!

Thu Mar 21 01:38:16 CET 2019

Forwarding per David's request.

Begin forwarded message:

From: David Lemon via OpenType <opentype-listmaster at indx.co.uk<mailto:opentype-listmaster at indx.co.uk>>
Subject: Re: [OpenType] More than 20 Stylistic Sets!
Date: March 20, 2019 at 4:53:21 PM PDT
To: <listmaster at indx.co.uk<mailto:listmaster at indx.co.uk>>
Reply-To: <opentype-list at indx.co.uk<mailto:opentype-list at indx.co.uk>>

Message from OpenType list:

My thanks to John H for pointing out the pressure point. Of course I completely agree; I've never been a fan of appropriating layout features for unintended uses, and Character Variant certainly should be supported. What I'd really like to see would be to have "the rest" of Stylistic Sets added to the spec, and to have Character Variants supported in significant app's.

If needed I'm willing to write the proposal. But I'd still be curious to see input from at least someone at Microsoft, since they were the ones who wanted to clamp at 20. (I wasn't going to point a finger, but John surfaced it so what the heck.)

[Ken, would mind you mind forwarding to the MPEG list? I seem to have broken something in that regard.]

mahalo,
David L

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Lunde via OpenType <opentype-listmaster at indx.co.uk<mailto:opentype-listmaster at indx.co.uk>>
Sent: Mar 20, 2019 12:51 PM
To: listmaster at indx.co.uk<mailto:listmaster at indx.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [mpeg-OTspec] Re: [OpenType] More than 20 Stylistic Sets!

Message from OpenType list:

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<mailto:tphinney at cal.berkeley.edu> [mpeg-OTspec] <mpeg-OTspec-noreply at yahoogroups.com<mailto: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<mailto:john at tiro.ca> [mpeg-OTspec] <mpeg-OTspec-noreply at yahoogroups.com<mailto:mpeg-OTspec-noreply at yahoogroups.com>> wrote:

On 20032019 12:40 pm, Ken Lunde lunde at adobe.com<mailto: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<http://tiro.com>
Salish Sea, BC  tiro at tiro.com<mailto:tiro at tiro.com>

NOTE: In the interests of productivity, I am currently
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“If I don’t use fancy words, you won’t know I’m an expert.”
—Marcel Matley, document examiner

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