[Lohit-devel-list] Releasing Lohit Devanagari Today!!

Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net
Wed Feb 3 21:42:30 UTC 2010


Le mercredi 03 février 2010 à 08:56 -0800, "Arne Götje (高盛華)" a
écrit :

> Regarding the 'locl' feature: It may work well in up-to-date software, 
> but it surely doesn't work in older installations.

Sadly almost every single smart font feature won't work in older
installations. There is no way to support those without giving up on all
the bits that have been added to the OpenType spec for i18n. And at that
point, making people switch to a text stack that understands Opentype is
a lot less work than trying to accomodate complex i18n cases without the
features added to the spec to help doing so. (Unfortunately, too few
OpenType features are used in English for the average English-speaking
app writer to care about them. So they keep finding reasons not to use
"complex" text stacks)

Now, I realize all Opentype features are not equal, some are almost
never used and could be considered exotic, but this is not the case for
locl. IIRC it's the default way according to MS to support Turkish and
Balkanic/Russian Cyrillic. Those are not considered complex or minority
scripts, coverage is expected of new latin or cyrillic fonts.

I'd be very surprised if more app designers had heard of ttc than of
locl. TTC is *very* uncommon in comparison to fonts that use locl. I'd
expect both to break in old (or even recent apps), but ttc support to
break more.

But anyway, as long as the "one font family and face per font file"
property that every font format but TTC guarantees is preserved, I don't
personally object to ttc use. Just have doubts it will work out any
better than locl.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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