Re: Math Working Group Charter

Le 18/02/2014 22:25, Paul Topping a écrit :
>
> On the web fonts, I really didn’t have an agenda. I just know that 
> math always has special requirements and there might be some areas 
> where we need some help. Recently, a question came up about access to 
> kerning info. Do webfonts currently allow JS code to access such 
> things? Same with the MATH table. Although the webfonts implementation 
> should make use of this data, might not JS code benefit from access to 
> it as well?
>
The kerning info is given in the MATH table so it will be accessible to 
browsers, but they will need to use it for the MathML rendering (the 
Gecko  bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=961482 but I 
have not started to work on that yet ; no plan for WebKit for now since 
there are more important issues to fix first).

The JS code can not have access to the kerning info but it does not have 
access to the MATH table either and even don't have access to basic font 
metrics that are unrelated to math nor to non-Unicode glyphs. In my 
opinion, that's a bit overkill to create JS API to expose all the font 
data just for the purpose of MathML polyfills especially if we see them 
as workaround before good native MathML support. I believe individuals 
and companies interested in this MATH feature as well as in 
compatibility with the Web platforms in general should focus on native 
MathML and help browser developers to create clean and efficient 
implementation rather than spending time on standardizing temporary hacks.

Also, for polyfills, one can just extract the kerning info from Open 
Type MATH table via a Python script and generate JS files with this 
info. This is what MathJax does for font metrics and for size variants 
and components of stretchy operators 
(https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-dev/tree/master/fonts/OpenTypeMath) 
and this can be done for all the MATH table parameters.

(note: the distinction between web or system fonts is irrelevant when 
talking about which info available to browsers or Javascript so that's 
why I didn't see why you mentioned Web fonts specifically)


-- 
Frédéric Wang
MathML Crowdfunding: ulule.com/mathematics-ebooks