Hi all, OpenType fonts are all the rage today. Are there any critiqes of the format, or discussions of its limitations? How many typesetting applications can actually take full advantage of opentype fonts? What are the chances that OpenType (at least some of its advanced features) will go the way of MultipleMaster fonts? The answers to these questions have a bearing on my own advanced Classical Arabic script project. For example, the ovf+ocp mechanism of Aleph seems much richer than what otf offers, so should I bother with otf at all or just stick to enriched Type1 fonts (>256 glyphs, used by LatinModern)? I may be mistaken, but it seems that the Aleph utilities need updating to take full advantage of enriched Type1 fonts (not to mention otf fonts). Right now I am still building ovf's from a series of standard type1's. Here is one possible limitation of otf (please correct me if I'm wrong): While an otf can contain an alternate glyph of a given character, it cannot tell the typesetting application that, if there is the equivalent to underfull paragraph spacing, replace the default <glyph>.1 with <glyph>.2. This sort of thing is common in, e.g. old Arabic lead-press books and in handwritten books. TeX should be capable of this, though it remains to be seen whether this should be implemented at the engine level (a la pdfetex) or at the macro level. Best Idris -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
Hi all,
OpenType fonts are all the rage today. Are there any critiqes of the format, or discussions of its limitations?
Despite it's apparent "smartness" and a lot of media hype, OpenType is still just a collection of glyphs and metainformation. XeTeX makes OpenType look intelligent, but that is because the program logic is wholly embedded in Mac OS X. At the core level, the real big difference with TTF and Type 1 is just that there is *more* metainfo (I am over simplifying it a bit, but not much). Aleph, or pdfetex, for that matter, will need extensions to make actual use of the extra metainformation. Whether that needs a new kind of OpenType-Font-Metric file or whether it can be done in macros/primitives is not clear yet (at least not for pdftex)
How many typesetting applications can actually take full advantage of opentype fonts?
There is a table at: http://www.opentype.com/html/opentype.aspx but how up-to-date that is, I do not know.
What are the chances that OpenType (at least some of its advanced features) will go the way of MultipleMaster fonts?
Do you mean "embedded metaness" or "terminated for marketing reasons"? the first, I doubt (too many font vendors involved with the spec; they can make more money from selling separate fonts) the latter is, of course, always possible but seems unlikely in short and medium time. Cheers, Taco
participants (2)
-
Idris Samawi Hamid
-
Taco Hoekwater