[MPEG-OTSPEC] Updates to specification

[Simon Cozens]

I want to clarify that what I was mainly asking about was editorial 
changes to the wording of the spec, rather than technological changes. 
There are two separate issues here, and maybe the editorial problem is a 
more tractable one.

Whether we're talking about MSOT or OFF, neither are a particularly 
beautiful piece of technical writing. Core terms are not defined; the 
style is all over the place; implementation detail is placed alongside 
format definitions; and the whole thing is replete with historical 
information which made sense when OT was being used by people already 
familiar with TrueType, but which is not appropriate within an 
independent file format today. I'm *particularly* surprised that ISO 
adopted wholesale such an informal "specification", when compared with 
the formality of other ISO standards.

This is why I have been adding mainly stylistic issues to the GitHub 
repository. But I don't have much clarity on what will happen to them 
there, nor (still) do I quite understand how they will make their way to 
OFF, if at all.

 From what I've gathered from the discussion so far, if I make those 
suggestions here, they will be picked up in both places; if I make them 
in MSOT via Github, there is no real guarantee that they will be brought 
back to OFF.

The technological stalling of OT is another issue - an important one - 
but not quite what I'm getting at right now.

 > That’s where we still are. My concern as we consider the scope of a
 > proposed text processing and display working group — I think calling it
 > a 'shaping working group' is begging the question with regard to scope
 > —, is that we can easily come up with a lot of excellent ideas and write
 > proposals and other documents, and if we go through the ISO AHG process
 > we can even get these things incorporated into the OFF de jure standard,
 > /and there will still be no guarantee that any of them will get
 > implemented or even get incorporated into the OT de facto standard./

A technical proposal without an implementation is just an idea. I would 
be amazed if any idea which came out of the text layout working group 
were not accompanied by a working open source implementation, such as a 
PR to Harfbuzz. In fact, I'd want to mandate it.

Simon