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

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 5:14 PM Vladimir Levantovsky <
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 - 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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