Re: Chrome to support WOFF

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 4:02 AM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> Does that mean WOFF fonts will be TTFs/OTFS in the cache? Will the
>> non-WOFF fonts be exposed or accessible anywhere?
>
> No, the cache is basically a holding area for blobs of data associated
> with a given URL.  It's not generally used to store data in
> intermediate forms.  When fonts are activated the font data is pulled
> into memory and passed to an OS routine to activate the font.  These
> are the same APIs that are used by other apps to display embedded
> fonts. They are not "installed" in any sense and are only available to
> the given page being displayed.
>
> The Chromium code does the extra step of reconstructing the entire
> font, sanitizing a specific set of tables and omitting all others
> (including GSUB, GPOS, and GDEF currently).  This was done because of
> concerns about potential security bugs lurking in platform font API's,
> especially on Windows.  WOFF support will just mean one more step
> internally in this assembly process.

This is of course what we hoped was meant, but without a reasonable
understanding of the relevant pipelines, the original description was
a bit opaque to us outside folk. Thanks!

T

-- 
"I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wife to murder,
and Guilder to blame for it. I'm swamped." — The Princess Bride

Received on Saturday, 24 April 2010 15:27:03 UTC