[MPEG-OTSPEC] Draft AHG report for your review

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

Dear Suzuki-san,

> Thank you for clarification. OK, so the "may not necessarily fall under the SC29/WG3 umbrella" means the mismatch of the technical scope - SC29/WG3 would discuss the font file format, not the expected API, behaviour, and the rasterized result of the implementations.

I am not sure I can agree with this specific interpretation. The APIs and rasterizer behavior may not even be subjects for discussions in FTCG, and I would say that the scope of standardization work that includes "possible solutions that operate on and at the interface between text encoding and font format" is much broader than what you mentioned. I think the most important point is that all of us can contribute our ideas to open discussions conducted in FTCG, and their decisions will be made reflecting a broad consensus.

> Also thank you for mention about 32-bit GID. Yes, it is clearly font file format discussion. I'm still wondering whether it should be standardized as an extension of ISO/IEC 14496-22, or, different font file format (of MPEG-4? or something else? yet I'm unfamiliar how many font file formats were proposed and dropped in the past, under SC29/WG11). I'm glad to hear that SC29/WG3 Font AHG would keep the door opened to hear the proposal for such big change.

When it comes to the work of extending 64K glyph limits, the amount of changes will be substantial, and, whether this will be implemented as a new standard or a new version / extension of OFF is too early to tell - we are simply not ready and not sufficiently informed to make such a decision today.
When it comes to font format proposals considered in the past - when this activity started, we had two competing proposals for font format: OpenType and Portable Font Resource (PFR). After an extensive evaluation, OpenType was chosen as an agreed solution for future standard, so PFR effectively was dropped from consideration. This happened in December 2003, and lead to the beginning of the OFF work starting in 2004.

Thank you,
Vlad