[MPEG-OTSPEC] Proposal to make OFF complete

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi all,

Just to get this out.

I think the conversation about text-shaping being adjacent to OFF, I think
that's a wrong way to think about this. OFF is **incomplete** without
script shaper specifications. It's like having an image file format without
specifying how to encode such an image into pixels. Indeed, LZMA is an
example of such kind of thing. It was dismissed for WOFF2 work and Brotli
developed instead (a better format BTW) because LZMA is not specified. So I
suggest making OFF actually usable by codifying script-specitic behavior.
That can be based on HarfBuzz interpretation for lack of a better source.

Moreover, I suggest CFF and CFF2 be removed from OFF. The
claim-to-superiority of CFF format is: 1. better hinting, and 2. better
compression. Re better-hinting, the interpretation of CFF hints is NOT
specified anywhere. Adobe's code in FreeType is what we have. Re better
compression, the existence of CFF in OpenType / OFF is partly why adding
quadratic beziers to glyf table has continually not happened.

In reality, CFF only serves Adobe, who sells their rasterizer to MS / Apple
platforms and serves only Adobe. Another example of Adobe abusing the
"open" ideology / terminology is the Noto CJK / Adobe-equivalent. It's NOT
open-source by any means. The sources are not available. That's something
that I pointed out directly to Ken Lunde at one of his Unicode Conference
presentations. Adobe is clearly aware of it. And I couldn't fix when I was
at Google.

Rip the bandaid. Make open standards truly open.

behdad
http://behdad.org/
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