Re: Firefox 44 (and Chrome in future) may reject some web fonts that were previously accepted

On 4/1/16 22:54, Roderick Sheeter wrote:
> Just a quick heads up, Firefox 44, coming Jan 26 2016
> (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/44) updates OTS to
> reject fonts if it rejected any of { GDEF, GSUB, GPOS }. Chrome will
> pick this up at some point as well.
>

I'm not sure this will affect Chrome, actually; my understanding is that 
Blink now lets GDEF/GSUB/GPOS tables bypass OTS validation, on the 
grounds that harfbuzz does its own sanitization before using them and 
therefore should be safe from malformed/malicious tables.

(See https://codereview.chromium.org/1306343006/)

It's possible we'll do something like that in Gecko at some point, 
though in principle I'd prefer to see pressure brought to bear on 
designers/authors to get incorrectly-built fonts fixed.

JK

> Previously OTS would drop the table(s) but accept the font so it would
> work as a web font, albeit potentially with odd behavior due to the
> missing tables.
>
> This change causes some fonts that were previously accepted to be
> rejected by the browser. If so, those fonts will require updates to
> continue to work as web fonts.
>
> See https://github.com/khaledhosny/ots/issues/74 for additional context
> around the OTS change.
>
> Rod S

Received on Tuesday, 5 January 2016 10:10:36 UTC