[MPEG-OTSPEC] Defining the text shaping working group’s scope

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

Hi Behdad,

I am sorry you feel that your voice has not been heard, I happen to think this is not the case and that your voice is heard loud and clear. You made your allegations in various public forums and directly in this group (https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2020-August/001903.html and https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2020-August/001925.html), and I am not sure if there is anything else that has to be done to acknowledge them.

To give this discussion a bit more of historical footing, in many of your posts you are referring to discussions that initially happened privately within a limited group of participants, who set the ambitious goal to give the second chance in life to variable fonts technology and unify prior approaches (variation fonts from Apple and multiple masters from Adobe) as part of the new, now widely supported version of OpenType / OFF. Since I wasn’t a participant of those initial private discussions, I cannot comment on them, neither on their substance nor on their format. What I do know is that once the initial agreements on tentatively proposed technical solutions were reached, the results of the discussion had been made available publicly, first for a technical review of much larger pool of participants (with many members of this group and myself included), then as a public presentation at the ATypI 2016 conference (https://www.atypi.org/conferences/atypi-warsaw-2016/programme/activity?a=619), and then presented to this group and to ISO WG as a collection of input contributions from their respective members (https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2016-October/000827.html).

My perspective on all this is that enabling new technical developments within the large installed base of the existing implementations on multiple different platforms is a significant effort, one that is never easy, and it likely required taking into consideration many factors including both new technical design considerations and shortcomings of the existing legacy implementations. The fact that you were among very few other people who could pull it off is in itself an achievement that deserves accolades and high commendations.

We cannot change what happened in the past, but we can learn from it and adjust our behaviors to make things better in the future. If you feel that your ideas back then had not received a sufficient level of consideration, we can always revisit them. Technical developments never stop, improvements are being made constantly, and this groups’ work is no exception. We strive to make our decisions and recommendations by consensus if at all possible, and as part of this process we try to accommodate different concerns from a purely pragmatic point of view – working implementations deployed on multiple platforms [that may be less than perfect] would likely be seen as advantageous to technically pure solutions that may not get wide support.

Open discussions in a public forum is what gives us needed assurances that all ideas and proposals are heard and treated equally on their value. My goal is to protect and preserve this public forum for us to be able to continue our work. Making accusations and assigning blame for something that happened in the past, in a different setting and outside of this particular forum isn’t constructive, unless we can learn from it, improve how we do things, and move on with the commitment to better our approaches and practices. This is clearly something we can all benefit from, in my opinion.

Thank you,
Vlad


From: Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org>
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2020 3:58 AM
To: Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com>
Cc: John Hudson <john at tiro.ca>; mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at
Subject: Re: [MPEG-OTSPEC] Defining the text shaping working group’s scope

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 8:28 PM Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com<mailto:Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com>> wrote:
On Saturday, August 15, 2020 11:55 AM John Hudson wrote:

On 15082020 8:12 am, 梁海 Liang Hai wrote:
> Part of the reason why I’m not keen on organizing this collective effort under ISO’s management (be it a WG, Ad Hoc Group, or what), is that ISO and/or JTC1’s publication process is not suitable for the documents we’re thinking. All we need is an easy to navigate modern website with all the vital information we want to maintain, but I doubt ISO/IEC ITTF will grant us that. To be honest, it’s a pain to read those procedural documents in JTC1’s official format—it’s just gonna discourage potential participants for no good reason.

Agreed.

Vlad does a great job of managing the institutional requirements — not
only for OFF and ISO but also for webfonts and W3C — but I'm not keen on
a process that effectively makes one person the interface between
collective effort and institutional approval.
Thank you John for your acknowledgement of my efforts. I would like to clarify certain things because I feel there is a possibility for confusion here as you mentioned two related but vastly different activities [that ironically share similar names – OFF and WOFF], where the roles I play are very different.

...

From ISO WG point of view, this started as an experiment and a favor to the community, and, after many years of successful development, we are now seen as pioneers of sorts, a group that did things differently and proved that we can be very successful and achieve great results with the bulk of the work done offline<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/d7T0CZ6oyzh5vrVnuzi9YX>. We also earned trust that our proposals and recommendations are consistently of high quality, and the successful industry-wide adoption of ISO OFF / OpenType standard speaks volumes – one of my goals is to preserve this trust and relationships with ISO WG for the benefit of this community!

https://twitter.com/behdadesfahbod/status/1295225739126571008<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/Sca0C1wnqGSMg2DwFG97Uy>
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