Re: Format name proposals

Dave Crossland wrote:

> 2009/8/18 John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>:
>> [By the way, since the OT and OFF specs are not formally identical and with
>> no guarantee against them diverging at some stage, I wonder if there is a
>> benefit to the web font format in choosing one of these as the formal
>> definition of the fontdata format?]

> For the benefit of those on this list who aren't familiar with the
> distinction, could you explain what the important differences are? :-)

There are currently no differences. The second edition of the OFF 
standard (ISO/IEC 14496-22:2009) was published last week, and it is 
identical to OT 1.6, which was published earlier in the year. So there 
was a period during which the two published specs were different, while 
the changes in the OT 1.6 spec were going through the ISO approval and 
formalisation process.

The expectation is that the OpenType and OFF specs will continue to be 
developed in unison and that they will remain identical. The process by 
which the OT spec is updated has become more consultative, I think, and 
this reflects the desire to make anything that goes into OT palatable to 
OFF also.

However, there is no formal agreement that the OT and OFF specs must 
remain identical, and hence there is at least the possibility that they 
might diverge in future. Microsoft reserves the right to make changes to 
OT that might not be reflected in OFF, and the OFF standards process 
could in theory result in changes that Microsoft would opt not to 
include in OT.

[I don't know what Adobe's official status is with regard to OT.]

John Hudson

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 21:11:23 UTC