RE: Getting started with WOFF 2.0: a template draft

Excellent news! Thank you Raph for taking this on and for your time and efforts you put into WOFF 2.0. Look forward to having a chance to review the spec, please keep the WG posted on your progress.

Thank you,
Vlad


From: Raph Levien [mailto:raph@google.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2014 11:39 AM
To: Chris Lilley
Cc: Levantovsky, Vladimir; public-webfonts-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Getting started with WOFF 2.0: a template draft

Thank you for this, it's quite helpful to get me started. I'm now deep into editing the draft, which I'm finding is mostly merging content from four sources: the WOFF 1 TR, the Microtype Express proposal, the "WOFF Ultra Condensed File Format" draft from a year or so back (which I'm finding is quite rough and in need of polishing), and the reference code (I consider the C++ encoder to now be the the source of truth for the format).

I personally am quite comfortable with old-school raw HTML editing. That's how I've created pretty much every web site I've done, and working in a raw text editor in one window and reloading in a browser in another is interactive enough for this kind of thing. BlueGriffon does look like a fine tool, though.

One item on my list is whether to expand the format to support the equivalent of TTC's. After diving into it, I think that's probably not a good idea, and I'll expand on my reasoning for that in a separate post.

Take care,

Raph

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org<mailto:chris@w3.org>> wrote:
Hello,

Attached is an empty (in terms of technical content) draft document
for a WOFF 2.0 specification. It meets all the current publication
rules (correct links to the patent policy, copyright, disclosures,
etc) and is set up as  first public working draft for the purposes of
checking.

You change it into an editors draft by commenting out the paragraphs
that say "First Public Working Draft" and changing the stylesheet link
from
  http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-WD

to
 http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-ED


You will also find these tools useful:

HTML5 validity checker
  http://validator.w3.org/nu/


CSS validator (can be a little flaky; if it gives errors, ask me)
  http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/


Link checker (including internal cross references)
  http://validator.w3.org/checklink


Pubrules checker
  http://www.w3.org/2005/07/pubrules?uimode=checker_full&uri=



Its usual to put technical documents in a version control system,
originally at W3C CVS (I can get you CVS accounts) although more
recently people are using Github which you may prefer (I can make a
Github group if you prefer that). Let me know.

For now, for the purposes of checking, I put it in CVS here
http://www.w3.org/Fonts/WG/WOFF2/

and in accordance with W3C conventions for a single-document spec it
is called Overview.html

Some things to bear in mind while editing:

* all headings must have an
id so they can be linked to directly.

* Link to the references section by putting link text in square
brackets: [WOFF 1.0] and adding a link like #ref-woff10

* be aware of the difference between normative and informative
references (the former all need to be stable by the time the document
gets to candidate recommendation)

that is all that comes to mind right now. I added a references section
so you can see how it works.

In terms of editing, and since not everyone is comfortable with
old-school direct editing of the html source, a tool I often use
myyself is BlueGriffon. Its free (although there are additional,
low-cost plugins to extend the functionality) and gives a visual
representation of the document, like a wordprocessor. The guy who
wrote it is the co-chair of the CSS working group and it uses the
rendering engine of the Mozilla Firefox browser, so what you see when
editing is what it will look like when published.

http://bluegriffon.org/


Its cross-platform (downloads for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux).

Let me know if you have questions or run into problems.


--
Best regards,
 Chris                          mailto:chris@w3.org<mailto:chris@w3.org>