Re: Announcing new font compression project

On Friday, March 30, 2012, 1:20:24 AM, Sylvain wrote:


SG> Re-enacting old battles never goes out of style but if there is
SG> such interest in it I suggest starting a separate thread
SG> (tentative subject line: ‘The MTX conspiracy!’).

Thanks Sylvain. I was just composing a similar message.

SG>   I’d rather read concrete feedback on Raph’s intruiguing proposal 

Yes.

So concretely, this is a WOFF update that uses the same overall structure and has similar benefits (such as inclusion of license and other metadata along with the font) but produces improved compression due to three things:

- MTX-derived table rearrangement to pre-compress and remove redundancies or derivable information
- LZMA compression (or is it LZMA2)?
- optional multi-table streams rather than one stream per table

When considering a new compression scheme for something already widely deployed, the following questions seem pertinent:

- is the improved compression significant enough to warrant a change (it seems that the answer is yes here, although it would be good to see more data with a wide variety of fonts)
- is the compression scheme well documented, with an open and freely implementable specification (seems so but again this needs to be verified)
- is there implementor interest
- are there any concerns regarding security
- are there any concerns regarding patent claims


-- 
 Chris Lilley   Technical Director, Interaction Domain                 
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead, Fonts Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG
 Member, CSS, WebFonts, SVG Working Groups

Received on Monday, 2 April 2012 16:03:59 UTC