[MPEG-OTSPEC] An input on the 5th edition

[木田泰夫]

Dear Sirs,

As this is the first time to send a message to this list, please allow me to introduce myself. I am a Japan SC29 committee liaison from CITPC, Japanese Character Information Technology Promotion Council. CITPC is a non-profit industry organisation comprised of most major Japanese font vendors. I worked for Apple as a software engineer/manager from 1989 to 2015 in the internationalisation group of the OS team. At Apple, I worked on several font-related projects, among others.


For the 5th edition of Open Font Format, CITPC would like to clarify how it describes ‘palt’.

It states, “If ‘kern’ is activated, ‘palt’ must also be activated if it exists.”.

First, does this sentence represent requirements for fonts? Or does it describe requirements for font rendering and text layout/shaping engines? It needs to be clarified which interpretation is correct.

Second, in ISO/IEC, the word “MUST” represents external constraints rather than requirements specified in standards. See 7.2 in ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2. This sentence should be reformulated using “shall”, “shall not”, “may”, and so forth.

We want to submit a proposal through the Japanese mirror for SC29 following further discussions within CITPC.

Thank you, in advance, for your consideration.

Best regards,

- kida