Re: TrueType Collections

Raph wrote:

> The other use case is packaging CJK fonts specialized to different
> locales (simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese) in the
> same font file.

I believe a more common CJK use for TTCs involves styling of Latin 
subsets: the shared glyf table contains both roman and italic Latin 
designs, differentiated via divergent cmap and name tables. This, of 
course, means that the huge quantity of CJK character glyphs do not need 
to be duplicated in separate fonts for Latin subset styles.

The same thing can ostensibly be handled using the OTL <ital> feature, 
but I am not sure how widely this is supported in software.

While I think Raph's analysis of the complexity and risk of TTC support 
in WOFF makes a lot of sense, I'm cautious about making this decision 
without more input, especially from Adobe. There's been a push recently 
to make TTC compatible with CFF flavour fonts, mostly driven by Adobe, 
so clearly they have some interest in the format (despite having 
previously registered the OTL features that would seem to make TTCs for 
CJK unnecessary), so I think it would be a good idea to find out from 
them what sort of use cases they envisage and whether they see a need 
for TTC support in WOFF.

Christopher, is this something on which you can comment?

JH

Received on Monday, 10 February 2014 19:31:16 UTC