[MPEG-OTSPEC] [EXTERNAL] Re: Does OpenType have a one to many GSUB-like feature please?

[Peter Constable]

John hit a key point:

> GSUB operates at the glyph ID number level…

A GSUB type 2 lookup can replace a single glyph with a sequence of glyphs, but after the initial character-to-glyph mapping (from the cmap table), you’re dealing with glyph IDs. And glyph IDs are font-specific, not something that can interoperate outside the font. Text-to-speech systems currently don’t interact with the glyph processing, but even if they did they’d have no basis to interpret the glyph IDs.

Instead of an approach using font-internal details, a better approach would be for text-to-speech systems to recognize the emoji characters and then use dictionaries of emoji keyword data, which Unicode CLDR provides, to select a word or words to render as speech.


Peter

From: mpeg-otspec <mpeg-otspec-bounces at lists.aau.at> on behalf of John Hudson <john at tiro.ca>
Date: Friday, December 23, 2022 at 9:09 AM
To: mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at <mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [MPEG-OTSPEC] Does OpenType have a one to many GSUB-like feature please?
Yes, OTL GSUB has a one-to-many lookup type (GSUB lookup type 2), but I don’t think this is relevant to the issue of emoji in text-to-speech systems.

I am wondering if a font could have a table where the codepoint (or postscript name) of an emoji is substituted by the codepoints of a sequence of regular text characters, with the output then routed to a text to speech system.

GSUB operates at the glyph ID number level, not at the codepoint level. Text-to-speech and text-to-glyphs can be seen as parallel but separate presentation technologies, both sitting on top of Unicode encoded text, but presenting that text in different ways. Text-to-speech systems rely on natural language processing, and the reason they become clunky when dealing with emoji—as with other symbols and non-linguistic content—is that such characters do not participate in linguistic communication, so at best have to be named or described. But what is being named or described is still at the character level, not at the glyph level.

JH

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John Hudson

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