Re: Next step?

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Tal Leming <tal@typesupply.com> wrote:
> Will you be disclosing IE's (and t2embed's) expectations about the font
> data? Something that is called "Compatibility" should have a clear set of
> specifications about what is required to make it compatible with the thing
> that "Compatibility" refers to. In addition to the defined EOT
> specification, these are the expectations that I know of:
>
> 1. The font must be TrueType flavored, not CFF.
> 2. No name table entry must be larger than 5000 bytes.
> 3. The full name (id 4) entry in the name table must start with the string
> defined in the family name (id 1) entry.
> 4. Style linking must be defined in the font since the CSS style linking is
> overridden by the font data.
> 5. The OS/2 fsType must not be set to "no-embedding."
>
> Are there more? If the point is compatibility with IE, then the requirements
> for compatibility with IE need to be defined. Font vendors must know this so
> that we can make our fonts meet these expectations, web developers will need
> to know these things so that they can be assured of compatibility and, I
> think, all browsers should have to implement the same set of expectations so
> that interoperability is truly achieved.
>
> To be clear, I am not endorsing CWT and I am not speaking as a co-author of
> the WOFF specification. I am speaking as someone who works with a number of
> foundries to produce fonts and as someone who actually experimented with
> EOTL. Font makers already have enough undefined expectations and bugs to
> guess about and work around. I quite strongly do not want to have more of
> these. It's bad for everyone involved -- the OS/app makers, the font makers
> and, most importantly, the users.

I agree with all of this.

~TJ