[MPEG-OTSPEC] Updates to specification

[Dave Crossland]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 1:44 PM John Hudson <john at tiro.ca> wrote:

> 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.*
>

But, what is different here and now in 2020, is that (a) the 'open text
stack' already powers Chrome, Firefox, Android, ChromeOS and other
GNU/Linux systems, and (b) Adobe CC apps and Microsoft Edge are adopting
'open text stack' code and abandoning proprietary stacks, and (c) anyone
can contribute implementations to freetype, harfbuzz, etc.

So if Simon or Behdad or anyone like them who is a sole proprietor
free-agent does implement something, and their Pull Request to the relevant
libre project is accepted and released in the next stable release of that
project, and that then ships in those major platform products, but then
proprietary stack developers do not also implement it, the value of a 'just
works everywhere' font format is lost.

That's going to be very expensive, and I would like very much to avoid it
from happening.
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