[MPEG-OTSPEC] Updates to specification

[Dave Crossland]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 2:55 PM Peter Constable <pgcon6 at msn.com> wrote:

> John has made an important point: a standard, even an ISO/IEC standard,
> isn’t worth much unless it’s actually implemented. My perspective on OT and
> OFF for several years now has been that a goal for most new technical
> enhancements should be broad adoption across major platforms.
>
>
>
> ...
>
>
>
> The lesson for me in all this has been that, whatever channel is used to
> introduce changes and, especially, to propose changes for new
> functionality, it’s critically important to have major platform vendors
> involved, at a minimum to give review and give a nod that the proposed
> enhancements would be useful, are well-enough designed and feasible, but
> even better to have two or more of them indicating a desire to implement
> the new design in their platforms in the foreseeable future. That was the
> approach I took for variations, and I think it’s been reasonably successful
> for industry as a whole.
>

&

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 3:07 PM Levantovsky, Vladimir <
Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com> wrote:

>
>
> When it comes to new proposals and technical changes, having private
> discussions to facilitate consensus and implementation plans can obviously
> be beneficial; however, the lack of transparency introduces clear and
> present danger that the open discussion process can be circumvented in
> favor of getting things done quicker. I don’t think I need to remind us all
> about past instances where hectic decisions made for expedience and
> convenience had backfired, and unnecessarily complicated the development
> process. The lack of transparency can also be used to make accusations of
> impropriety [regardless of whether real or perceived], and should be
> avoided at all costs. This is why it is so important that we have these
> discussion here, out in the open, with unmoderated access for any
> interested party to join.
>

It seems to me that having a central forum to propose Things without
any guarantee of implementation, or of co-incorporation into the OFF and OT
standards, is important.

It is not necessary for any particular implementor to have implemented, be
implementing, promise or suggest a future effort to implement.

But it is vitally necessary for those implementers to have a window of
opportunity to discuss, suggest, oppose, endorse, not oppose, those Things,
so that if and when they do decide to implement, they have a clear path to
follow.

Yet, this list hasn't been that central forum.

While the recent obscurity of this list can be fairly easily resolved, it
seems to me that that email lists are not as effective as git repos with
integrated issue trackers for collaboration on documents. Of the several
places where discussions have arisen in the last few years, most of them
are such Github repos:

(1) meta discussions about how to make font format spec updates - here, on
Twitter.com, and TypeDrawers.com.

(2) editorial change ideas happening here and in
 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/typography-issues/issues and
https://www.commontype.org .

(3) technical change ideas happening here and in
https://github.com/opentype ,
https://github.com/commontype-standard
<https://github.com/commontype-standard/commontype/issues> ,
https://github.com/be5invis/OTVAR-ZVAR-Table ,
https://github.com/microsoft/OpenTypeDesignVariationAxisTags ,
https://github.com/googlefonts/colr-gradients-spec and
https://github.com/microsoft/OpenType-XVAR-proposal .

(4) efforts to consolidate the 'script development specs' such as
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/script-development/bengali from
MS,
https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents/ from Nathan Willis,
https://github.com/typotheque/text-shaping from Liang Hai, and related
tools like
https://bitbucket.org/LindenbergSW/fontdoctools/src/master/R%C3%B6ntgen.md
from Norbert Lindenberg.

So, to the subject line, if any of these efforts want to land changes in
the OFF spec, mailing suggestions to this list and expecting Vlad to copy
and paste text from email app to document editor app seems a bit... cruel
:) Clearly this is a solved problem :)

I expect that many of those Github repos would close, if there was a true
central repo that their energy could be productively funnelled into.

Given 'here' is somewhat random Austrian university mailman, can the AHG
have such a Github repo?
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