Re: Unified draft of SVG-in-OT

On 26/7/13 17:05, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> So I have a glyph with a defined height and width, yes?
>
> My layout engine needs to position the next glyph in the run.  Does it
> use the advance width or the ink box width?

The advance width. That's always been the case, regardless of the glyph 
outline technology. The ink box has no bearing on layout (except, 
perhaps, if a layout engine is attempting to do some kind of "automatic 
kerning" or such like -- but in that case, it would need to examine the 
actual shape of the glyph's ink, not just its bounding box).

In general, a layout engine can place glyphs purely using the 'hmtx' 
table (plus 'kern' and 'GPOS', if present); it doesn't need to look at 
the actual glyphs in the 'glyf' or 'CFF ' table at all.

(An exception would be if there are GPOS anchor points using 
AnchorFormat2, referring to specific points on the hinted outline. 
That's not going to work for SVG glyphs -- positioning would just have 
to be based on the unhinted design coordinates.)

>
> My layout engine needs to position an underline – does it use the
> baseline, the ink box, other?

The underline position as specified in the 'post' table. Or some other 
heuristic, if you prefer -- but surely not the ink box of each glyph. 
Would you expect the underline under "flip-flop" to dip down under the 
"p" glyphs, and rise up for the hyphen? Nor the maximal ink box of the 
font as a whole -- or else the underline for Zapfino would be WAY down 
there.

Again, the ink box is irrelevant to layout. Its only (potential) value 
is to help a renderer optimize its painting operations.

>
> Today – this is all well defined for OT (and other font types) so that
> layout engines can produce the same result from the same font.   Also,
> what happens when you take the same content and render it in an
> SVG-glyph-aware renderer and one that only does the standard glyphs?
>   Does my layout shift?

No (modulo the potential AnchorFormat2 hinting issue). Layout depends on 
the glyph advances, the line metrics, any GPOS adjustments, etc., but is 
independent of the glyph outlines.

>
> It is important that we define the behavior of these new glyph types
> with all the detail that we have for the current types of glyphs.
>
> Leonard
>

Received on Friday, 26 July 2013 16:27:15 UTC