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

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 4:37 PM Dave Crossland <dcrossland at google.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 5:51 PM Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 3:35 PM Levantovsky, Vladimir <
>> 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.
>>
>
> I object to the proposal to remove CFF2, because while few CFF2 VF fonts
> are available, CFF2 is now widely implemented by font engines
>

It's in OpenType. I don't see why it needs to be in OFF from a
forward-looking point of view.
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