[MPEG-OTSPEC] Scheduling Zoom meeting to discuss new proposals and AHG recommendations

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Josh

Thanks for sending before the holidays :) Any chance you or anyone from
Adobe will be attending the TypeCon event in August


On Fri, Jun 30, 2023 at 12:18 PM Josh Hadley <johadley at adobe.com> wrote:

>
>    - avar v2: generally seems straightforward (and is already implemented
>    by Apple & others); we are in favor of moving forward with getting this
>    adopted as proposed.
>
>
Excellent! I believe then the only folks who have said they would like to
make suggestions about avar2 are Microsoft, and I guess that may have to
end up being avar3 given consensus from everyone else that avar2 is good to
go.


> For the following 3 points, we have general concerns about fonts created
> with the proposed updates landing on legacy systems which cannot be updated
> to recognize the new scheme. The proposed updates seem to be designed in a
> way that would allow that to happen (easily) which would result in a very
> poor user experience.
>

Fair enough. I think making the changes clearly incompatible with legacy
systems so that newer fonts can not be read at all on these systems will
benefit from clear branding and a new filename extension (eg ".ot2") – and
opens the door to many other changes, such as deduplication of vetrics
metrics and other annoying cruft that persists *because* of a commitment to
(partial) functionality in legacy systems. I have understood that as a
benefit and a design goal for v1.8. Maybe its time to cross the rubicon.


>
>    - Breaking the 16-bit glyph count limit: we are definitely interested
>    in making some form of this happen as we have a number of projects that
>    would benefit.
>    - Variable Components: we support this idea and have several projects
>    that would benefit considerably from it.
>    - Cubic-in-glyf: the proposal seems somewhat incomplete regarding
>    hints and how they will work.
>
>
AFAIK hinting would work exactly the same for quadratic-in-glyf; points are
addressed by normal TT hinting according to index number, so no change
there.


> We would also like to remind folks that the format has already adopted
> CFF2 which uses cubics and can already address > 16-bit glyph indices.
>

Sadly since I see color variable fonts as the future, I am not sure where
CFF2 and SVG-in-OT will go. Would there be a CFF3 that supports color and
the things under discussion here, or, would cubic-in-glyf plus support for
PS hinting be effectively CFF3?

Cheers
Dave
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