[MPEG-OTSPEC] Removal of the CFF and CF2 from OFF standard (was: Proposal to make OFF complete)

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

On Wednesday, October 7, 2020 5:52 PM Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

Also, procedurally, please help me understand. I thought you vote with your SC29/WG3 member representative hat on at the WG3 meeting, NOT here on the AHG.

Correction: as a SC29/WG3 member who is also a member of this AHG

So I expect the proposal to be rolled up to WG3, and you can then vote on it there.

Nothing is ever rolled up, unless we have a consensus within this AHG to recommend something to be considered by the WG. The WG members can choose to submit their input directly to the WG for consideration.

Am I missing something?

Yes.

behdad
http://behdad.org/<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/dZzcC1wnqGSpqRPOULZY4H/>


On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 3:50 PM Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org<mailto:behdad at behdad.org>> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 3:35 PM Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com<mailto:Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com>> wrote:
On Wednesday, August 19, 2020 12:40 AM Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
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.

With my SC29/WG3 member representative hat on (and _not_ serving in my capacity as a chair of this AHG) I object to this proposal. With many thousands of fonts currently deployed, and at least two (or more) different implementations available – this proposal, if considered, would do more harm than good.

Okay let me narrow down the proposal to removing CFF2 only.

Is there any evidence that there are "thousands of fonts currently deployed"? And is there any evidence of at least two different implementations (that is, that are not derived from same Adobe implementation)?


Vlad


behdad
http://behdad.org/<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/Cxg_C2kor7tk8jB6i1vjQu/>
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