RE: Web font test cases: file linking vs. data URI embedding, CSS font stack subsets

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 3:29 AM John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>:

>splitting fonts into multiple files is fraught with peril.
Please explain what you mean by splitting, John. Splitting just for the sake
of obfuscation or a ham-fisted Fontlab fumble that I might attempt?
(Frightening.)
But smart, knowledgeable sub-setting to keep file sizes small and
on-purpose, would seem to be a valuable service and/or product to provide in
light of the file sizes involved. Indeed, this seemed to be one of the
promises of Microsoft's WEFT tool. Is it not truly doable?

>I think font splitting is a bit of a 
>non-starter, at least as a general purpose mechanism.
Once again, "splitting" means...?

Regards,
Rich

-----Original Message-----
From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
John Hudson
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 3:29 AM
To: Ben Weiner
Cc: www-font; John Daggett
Subject: Re: Web font test cases: file linking vs. data URI embedding, CSS
font stack subsets

Ben Weiner wrote:

> Would joined/substituted glyphs fail in a similar way if, say, an Arabic 
> font was split up into subsets? Our discussion is very Latin-centric ;-)

Yes. OpenType Layout is processed in glyph runs, and a change of font 
breaks a run.

As John D says, splitting fonts into multiple files is fraught with 
peril. It can be done cleverly for simple scripts that don't need 
complex layout, e.g. by parsing the kern data and avoiding putting 
glyphs with a kerning relationship into separate fonts, but then the 
whole value of font splitting becomes dependent on how extensively 
hinted a font is. On the whole, I think font splitting is a bit of a 
non-starter, at least as a general purpose mechanism.

John H.

Received on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 14:26:31 UTC