[MPEG-OTSPEC] AHG Font Format Kick-off: 5th ed. Working Draft and future milestones

[Vladimir Levantovsky]

Dear AHG members,

 

Thank you for contributing to AHG discussions and sharing your proposals for OFF spec improvements and updates.

I’d like to remind you that we are rapidly approaching the deadlines for new input submissions to the WG3 “MPEG Systems” meeting, which will take place on April 24-28, 2023: 

- input contributions registration deadline is the end of day Central EU time on Monday, April 17;

- any registered input contributions will need to be uploaded by the end of day Central EU time on Wednesday, April 19.

 

For future proposed technical contributions (if any), I would like to consider highlighting any possible backward compatibility issues as part of the future submissions, similar to how it’s being currently discussed as part of Harfbuzz community discussion (https://github.com/harfbuzz/boring-expansion-spec/issues/86).

 

I’d also really appreciate if all stakeholders / implementers of current standard would voice their opinion on the detailed goals outlined below for possible future enhancements of the OFF spec.

 

Thank you,

Vladimir

 

 

From: Dave Crossland [mailto:dcrossland at google.com] 
Sent: Monday, March 6, 2023 5:41 PM
To: Vladimir Levantovsky <vladimir.levantovsky at gmail.com>
Cc: MPEG OT Spec list <mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at>
Subject: Re: [MPEG-OTSPEC] AHG Font Format Kick-off: 5th ed. Working Draft and future milestones

 

 

Hi

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 5:14 PM Vladimir Levantovsky <vladimir.levantovsky at gmail.com <mailto:vladimir.levantovsky at gmail.com> > wrote:
>
> The deadline for submission of the input contributions for the next meeting is April 17, 2023 – please make all reasonable efforts to finalize your submissions early rather than late, and please do not hesitate to raise new topics for discussion in this AHG – we still have plenty of time to do so.

The Noto project offers a large collection of fonts for 100s of writing systems - each covered by the Unicode standard :) 

 

Google Fonts would like to take Noto Sans and Noto Serif to the next level by creating a single compact pan-Unicode font for each design. 

 

Within these fonts, we would like to see the glyphs be composed from reusable parts that are built using new variation capabilities, separate how the parts are crafted and assembled from how they are presented to the user.

Behdad and the Harfbuzz community have been working on github.com/harfbuzz/boring-expansion-spec <https://github.com/harfbuzz/boring-expansion-spec>  - a set of changes to the tech spec, implemented in harfbuzz to overcome limitations of the existing spec tech, with 3  top level goals, the first of which has 4 subgoals to achieve the above, as detailed on that page:

 

1a. Break the 65k glyph limit on glyphs in a single font file
1b. Enable cubic curves in glyf outlines
1c. Enable components to take advantage of variations
1d. Enhance core variation capability with "avar2" (support for user-facing vs internal axis distinction and the mapping between them); explicitly support HOI as Underware have demo'd it; and make more efficient storage of sparse variation data.

 

The other top level goals are, I would say:

 

2. Provide a de-duplicated, "clean cut" subset version of the spec; currently the closest thing to this is the "internal representation" that font compilers use when converting source formats into binaries.

 

3. Provide an 'escape hatch' from the inherent limitations of GSUB/GPOS shaping, using WebAssembly as a hardened runtime, that already ships on all major platforms.

 

This "master plan" was initially presented by Behdad in April 2021, and Simon Cozens made an excellent summary deck @ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dVfuU7YhUBXg9MtU6kYBXVs9082PiHpwhGPYa--yA7c

 

There are beefy new topics, but the four listed as 1a-d are the most important, I think.

 

Cheers

Dave

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