- From: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:42:15 -0700
- To: "Levantovsky, Vladimir" <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com>
- Cc: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>, www-style <www-style@w3.org>
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com> wrote: > On Friday, March 26, 2010 4:01 AM Thomas Phinney wrote: >> >> On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:36 AM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> >> wrote: >> > >> > I'd actually prefer to refer to the OpenType spec directly as the >> > normative reference for what these defaults are but that spec is >> > sometimes unclear about whether a given feature is enabled by default >> > or not. For example, are old-style figures enabled or not by >> default? >> > My reasonable guess is they're not (that makes more sense) but the >> > OpenType spec just says "Users can switch between the lining and >> > oldstyle sets by turning this feature on or off." >> > >> > I think that may be a bug in the spec, if a designer uses old-style >> > figures as the default glyphs for numerals then the statement above >> > will be incorrect. >> >> You're correct, that's a bug in the OT spec. It would be more accurate >> if it said something like: "Users can override the default figures >> with oldstyle figures by turning this feature on. Default figures are >> commonly (but not necessarily) lining figures." >> > > It's been mentioned on more than one occasion that OpenType spec has historically been and still is a font format specification, not a text layout implementation spec. This is the reason why some of the information on layout features including their default values, feature interactions and layout engine behavior isn't there. As much as we would want to change this, it's not something that can be easily fixed. It is my personal opinion that we can and should move in that direction, even if we do it piecemeal. But this issue aside, there IS information in the current spec about defaults/behaviors for this feature, and it is either wrong, or at best misleading. I think it should be corrected at some point. If you want to avoid making comments about common practice in fonts, then drop the second sentence of my suggested revision. Regards, T -- "The rat's perturbed; it must sense nanobots! Code grey! We have a Helvetica scenario!" — http://xkcd.com/683/
Received on Friday, 26 March 2010 19:42:47 UTC