Re: Smart-font features

On 01/31/2003 07:07:37 PM "Christoph Päper" wrote:
>Sounds to me as if you were looking for CSS's @font-face construct and its
>children: <http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#font-selection>.

Thanks, I'll check that out.


On 01/31/2003 06:31:33 PM Tom Gewecke wrote:
>Could you give an idea or point to anything online which describes more
>specifically what is meant by these Graphite "features" that might need to
>be activated by markup?

Some examples can be seen at
<http://developer.apple.com/fonts/Registry/index.html#Type0>, which
describes Apple's feature registry.

The Graphite documentation doesn't discuss the concept of features much,
but our main paper on the Graphite Description Language does describe how
to program them (graphite.sil.org, link "Graphite Description Language",
page 20). Here are some ideas that we've discussed or experimented with in
Graphite-enabled fonts so far:

- letter shape variations (eg, three forms of uppercase eng, alternate bowl
shape for letters like g, Cyrillic E needed for Mongolian)
- presence/absence of diacritics (eg, Hebrew)
- alternate diacritic positioning (eg, Vietnamese, certain forms of Arabic)
- independent diacritic manipulation (on/off)
- ligature formation
- ligature manipulation
- case modifications (eg, small caps, title case)
- alternate ways of representing tone (tone letters vs. superscripts)
- fraction format (1/2 vs. ½ vs. the form with a truly horizontal line)
- show/hide invisible characters
- show underlying data (eg, don't reorder in Indic scripts)
- expanded mode
- fancy typography (eg, line-end swashes)
- alternate/experimental orthographies
- transliteration

As you can see, many of these are binary-valued features, eg "show
invisible characters" or "hide invisible characters". But something like
the alternate forms of the uppercase eng would have three possible values,
corresponding to the three forms (that we know of!).

Received on Saturday, 1 February 2003 20:56:18 UTC