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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">I agree that this kind of info could be
extraordinarily helpful... but I'm wondering if a simple list of
language IDs is sufficient? I think the problem is more
complicated than that, and we may need to step back a bit and
figure out what info is really needed. The following is a bit more
"thinking out loud"...<br>
<br>
Broad-spectrum fonts like Times New Roman or Charis SIL highlight
some unique issues:<br>
<br>
- They support many hundreds of languages. Enumerating the list
for such fonts will be the first challenge. Moreover, the design
of a data structure to hold the resulting list needs to
accommodate hundreds of entries with reasonable expectations on
client searching.<br>
<br>
- What if certain OT features have to be enabled for the font to
render language-appropriate shapes? (IMO the 'locl' feature is
currently insufficient as it depends on OT language tags which are
incomplete for the 6900 languages of the world.)<br>
<br>
- The growth (and convergence) of web-font and mobile technologies
has resulted in a growing interest dynamic font subsetting. This
is related to the subject issue because both involve a prior
problem: knowing what characters are needed to support a given
language. I wonder if we shouldn't be focusing on how to populate
and utilize something like <a
href="http://cldr.unicode.org/translation/characters#TOC-Exemplar-Characters">CLDR
Exemplar data</a> -- then fonts might not have to explicitly
list what languages they support (except for the problem of
language-specific shaping).<br>
<br>
Like I said, I think the problem is more complicated....<br>
<br>
Bob Hallissy<br>
<br>
<br>
On 2013-01-04 at 8:45 Ken Lunde wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:2ACB32C1-A69A-48EC-97DB-C6B47DF5FE6C@adobe.com"
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<pre wrap="">Regardless of where this information goes, it is important and useful, because implementations are currently forced to employ heuristics to arrive at this information, such as 'OS/2' table settings, Unicode ranges in the 'cmap' table, the language settings for existing 'name' table strings, and so on. Explicitly stating the intended language (or languages) of the font resource, or even the converse, is extraordinarily helpful.</pre>
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