[MPEG-OTSPEC] To add some more perspective

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

I think that in order to gain some real-life additional perspective on how things came to be in the world of font format standardization, we need to travel down the memory lane to the early days of OFF development, and account for its relationship to other industry standards.

Before 2004, OpenType was a font format specification that was publicly available, and it also was a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft and Adobe. While OT had enjoyed wide support on two major computing platforms (Windows and Mac), and was truly a de facto standard for font developers, it had no foothold in any of the consumer electronic devices. This has changed drastically with the development and introduction of the OFF (ISO/IEC 14496-22) that was in its entirety based on OpenType 1.4 that MS and Adobe contributed to ISO.

In order to understand why OT adoption lagged in CE devices, one has to consider the following two major factors:

1)      Proprietary nature of OT developed by a company that dominated the industry and its unknown IP portfolio / licensing considerations, which stopped many consumer electronics device manufacturers from ever considering it for implementation;

2)      Lack of real-world system implementations where fonts had to be exchanged between applications, or downloaded to CE devices. In a world where resident fonts is all you ever rely on – a font format standard makes no practical difference.

However, since early 2000s there had been many developments that changed the world of multimedia presentations. Among those collaborative developments [conducted by the organizations that had strong ties with ISO], there were:

-          MPEG-4, a new multimedia standard where media components [including video, audio, graphics, and text] would be delivered to an MPEG-4 receiver as resources, and composed and rendered by a terminal according to the MPEG-4 scene description;

-          Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) - a major development conducted [at approx. same time frame as MPEG-4] by the DVB Project with cooperation with other TV industry organizations (including OCAP, ATSC and Blu-Ray Disk Forum) – one that changed the way how DTV applications are developed and deployed in OTT and cable broadcast, and in packaged media (Blu-Ray);

-          Dynamic & Interactive Multimedia Scenes (developed by 3GPP) and Rich Media Environment (developed by Open Mobile Alliance) creating new environments for multimedia applications on mobile devices, and

-          Java ME upgrades that introduced middleware support for downloadable fonts (JSR-271 and JSR-287).

So, while OpenType [due to its strong brand name and industry foothold] had remained the de facto font format standard among font vendors and text shaping / font rendering implementers, the introduction and publication of the ISO/IEC 14496-22 “OFF” had removed the cloud of uncertainty for the TV and CE industries that were reliant on ISO standards, establishing OpenType as a true open standard.

By 2009, the OFF was mandated by all industry specifications mentioned above, paving the way for OpenType adoption in virtually all CE devices –digital TVs, cable / terrestrial / IPTV set-top boxes, smartphones, Blu-Ray applications and disk players, game consoles … culminating in the W3C development of WOFF1 and WOFF2 and fueling the unprecedented growth of web fonts adoption (https://www.w3.org/blog/2020/07/happy-birthday-web-fonts/).

There can be (and have been) plenty of cases when we find it frustrating to deal with ISO; however, we need to remember that:

-          It was the explosive adoption of _ISO_ OFF standard in CE and mobile devices and applications that opened new domains [and offered untapped potentials] for new technical implementations. In a world where Windows and Mac had been the only platforms supporting OpenType / AAT fonts – there would be no need for FreeType and HarfBuzz.

-          It was the ubiquitous OFF support in _all_ devices that built the foundation for unprecedented web fonts adoption, which created new, huge marketplace for font developers and font vendors.

ISO (with all of its outdated processes and archaic tools) has played a significant role in all of this – think about how much we, as a community, have gained from OFF development, and think about how much font vendors and font community at large has benefited from its adoption in CE devices and on the web!

Vlad

P.S. John Hudson wrote:
I dearly wish that the format had been openly standardised through W3C or Unicode — or pretty much any organisation other than ISO.
Standardizing a technology isn’t easy, getting it to the point of ubiquitous adoption where it offers real-world benefits is a task that is likely in the order of magnitude more complex than technical standardization itself – think about it when considering a next venue for the next standardization activity! The standards world has plenty examples of developing dead standards – thankfully, the ISO/IEC 14496-22 “OFF” isn’t one of them!


From: mpeg-otspec <mpeg-otspec-bounces at lists.aau.at> On Behalf Of John Hudson
Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2020 2:15 PM
Cc: mpeg-otspec <mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at>
Subject: Re: [MPEG-OTSPEC] To add some more perspective

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/<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/PwLQCmZn6YI5pXvRSGT_Nc/>

    HarfBuzz is an OpenType<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/_Y_eCn5oXgsGXwn6fJqyUG/> 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<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/L4_3CpYqKkUz9k5xhGwBIq>

Salish Sea, BC        tiro at tiro.com<mailto:tiro at tiro.com>



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