[MPEG-OTSPEC] To add some more perspective

[John Hudson]

On 26092020 4:48 pm, Dave Crossland wrote:
> So I think it's more accurate to say, today:
>
> Microsoft's OT ___implementation___ ***was*** the de facto standard.
>
> Past tense because there's an implementation called the Persian words 
> Open and Type transliterated in Latin script, Harf Buzz, which I argue 
> is now established as the new de facto standard implementation.

HarfBuzz is definitely a very, very important implemetation of OpenType 
/Layout/ and of text shaping (which isn't formally part of the OpenType 
or OFF specifications). But there is a lot more to OpenType than OTL.

> That's what changed since 2015: hb is now at the core of Adobe and 
> Microsoft flagship products, joining Google and Facebook and Amazon. I 
> suspect only Apple's product line is harfbuzzless.

I think you are overstating the case. HarfBuzz is at the core of 
Microsoft's new browser — which has a /tiny/ market share—, but 
Microsoft's flagship products remain Windows and Office, and the DWrite 
implementation of OpenType Layout remains critical to those, and 
continues to be the de facto reference implementation for a lot of 
people (not forgetting that HarfBuzz necessarily used Microsoft's OTL 
implementation as a reference, since it needed to provide compatible 
behaviour).

Adobe are using a somewhat hampered HarfBuzz as an option in Illustrater 
and Photoshop alongside their other shaping engines, and are still in 
alpha stage of integrating it in InDesign. I am all for Adobe ditching 
their own shaping engines and embracing HarfBuzz fully, but I suspect 
we're going to see multiple shaping engines in use for some time yet.

So I don't think we're quite at a place where there is a single de facto 
reference implementation for OpenType /Layout/, let alone all the other 
aspects of OT for which HarfBuzz is not directly responsible — e.g. 
rendering, variations. And a reference implementation for OpenType 
/Layout /will provide the reference for an OTL /implementation/ 
specification, which remains to be written and is not what either the 
OT  or OFF specifications are.

In any case, this doesn't change my initial observation that 
‘Microsoft's OT spec is the /de facto/ standard’ for the font format and 
/not/ OFF. HarfBuzz is an implementation of OpenType: it says so 
explicitly in the first paragraph at https://harfbuzz.github.io/

     HarfBuzz is anOpenType 
<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/>text shaping engine. Using 
the HarfBuzz library allows
     programs to convert a sequence of Unicode input into properly 
formatted and
     positioned glyph output—for any writing system and language.

and links to the MS OT spec page, not to OFF.


I'm with you that a more open collaborative future probably does mean 
feeding into OFF rather than MSOT.

And I think we will find that frustrating in its own ways, and I dearly 
wish that the format had been openly standardised through W3C or Unicode 
— or pretty much any organisation other than ISO.*

JH


*Back in the early 2000s Microsoft and Adobe's collaboration on OpenType 
was already unraveling, and a developer from Adobe — frustrated by what 
they thought was an unequal partnership in which Adobe hampered — 
approached me about the possibility of ATypI taking ownership of the 
font format. More recently, people have asked me what I thought about 
the idea of Unicode taking ownership of OpenType. I don't think I've 
ever encountered anyone who is actually enthusiastic about OFF, and 
people are still talking about trying to find a better home for OT.


-- 

John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks Ltd    www.tiro.com
Salish Sea, BC        tiro at tiro.com

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