[MPEG-OTSPEC] Proposal to make OFF complete

[Behdad Esfahbod]

I meant adding cubic beziers to glyf obviously, not quadratic.

behdad
http://behdad.org/


On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 10:40 PM Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> wrote:

> 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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