Typophile - Apple and CFF: what's the deal? - Comments

OS X may have had a lot of

Thomas Phinney — Thu, 6 Dec 2007 20:32:27 -0800

OS X may have had a lot of font-handling bugs, but you have to give Dan F and Apple kudos for working so hard to fix them - especially lately.

Cheers,

I hope so too, Adam. I

dezcom — Thu, 6 Dec 2007 17:43:57 -0800

I hope so too, Adam. I don’t know if Dan or anyone else at Apple is still paying attention. I hope so.

ChrisL

Chris, I guess if Apple

twardoch — Thu, 6 Dec 2007 15:42:13 -0800

Chris,

I guess if Apple says “expanding general language specifying support [is] still in planning”, then it won’t happen before Mac OS X 10.6 in two years or so. Let’s not hold our breath — but let’s hope that the obvious bugs in Leopard’s OT feature handling get fixed sometime soon.

Best,
Adam

>>>”Is language-dependent

dezcom — Thu, 6 Dec 2007 11:13:30 -0800

>>>”Is language-dependent processing (the “locl” feature) supported anyhow?
Er, no. And this is because Leopard OT layout isn’t looking at the languages and the UI doesn’t really allow for it. Though, there are now discussions about expanding general language specifying support. Can’t say much more about that since it’s still in planning but we are very much aware of the need and want to address it.
Dan”<<<

Dan,
Any more progress on this? Language support is a pretty major thing and is bound to open up more userbase for Apple if handled well. I hope that THEY let you proceed with full support on this right away.

ChrisL

Miguel — the OT

kikujiro — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 06:49:44 -0800

Miguel — the OT style-linking bugs you mention (which I posted here, not realising how much livelier the Typophile forums were) have been fixed in Leopard (as of 10.5.1; I never checked in 10.5). At least, the default font when selecting Arno Pro is now Regular, and command-B/command-I do sensible things at last. The list order looks much the same but with a better default at the top.

More generally — I realise this is dragging the thread way off topic, but as it seems to be a productive place to discuss Leopard font bugs, may I point out with some frustration that a very old bug has returned from 10.3.5, viz broken support for old PS1 fonts with alternative glyph sets — most notably ’Expert’ fonts, which have been working fine since 10.3.6, and now don’t display any more? Dan, if you’re reading, I did file this on Bug Reporter, but any help in getting it fixed in the next SU would be much appreciated. I’ve had to go back to fake small caps and lining figures, and they’re horrible.

Thomas — InDesign does the

k.l. — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:53:48 -0800

Thomas — InDesign does the first behavior, not the second, to the best of my knowledge. I consider that first one the “expected” behavior.

Ouch, right!
(Don’t remember how I got at that idea but obviously liked it much ...)

Karsten

Dan, please contact me

twardoch — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:51:08 -0800

Dan,

please contact me offlist at adam at twardoch dot com.

Hey, Dan (F), nice to see

Thomas Phinney — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:31:11 -0800

Hey, Dan (F), nice to see you here. Note that Adobe Arabic is an OpenType CFF font family that has the ’mark’ and I think the ’mkmk’ feature as well. You should have it already for testing, and if not I can certainly send it to you.

Karsten asked: Does it rely on 4-style subfamilies defined by name table IDs 1+2 and OS/2 fsSelection? Or does it rely on the OS/2 weight value and allow toggling through weights, as in Adobe applications?

InDesign does the first behavior, not the second, to the best of my knowledge. I consider that first one the “expected” behavior. Is there some particular Adobe app in which you’ve observed the second behavior?

(Say, I tried to close any open tags that might have been causing the ongoing italics, but it didn’t work, so it wasn’t ’cite’ or ’em’ or ’i’ doing it. Sigh.)

Cheers,

“Why is Apple taking so

dberlow — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:35:07 -0800

“Why is Apple taking so long to adopt the standard and what is the best way to get around this apparent obstacle? “

I don’t know the answer to the first question, but we added a dial tone to all our fonts and everything seems to work fine on the Mac now.

Cheers!

> I could really use a Latin

Miguel Sousa — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:32:07 -0800

> I could really use a Latin font that relies upon those features to add to my support. Any well known candidates you can suggest?

Vista ships with enhanced versions of Arial and Times New Roman that contain ’mkmk’ and ’mark’.

Is language-dependent

dannomon — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:07:32 -0800

Is language-dependent processing (the “locl” feature) supported anyhow?

Er, no. And this is because Leopard OT layout isn’t looking at the languages and the UI doesn’t really allow for it. Though, there are now discussions about expanding general language specifying support. Can’t say much more about that since it’s still in planning but we are very much aware of the need and want to address it.

Dan

What I refer to is UI

dannomon — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:50:27 -0800

What I refer to is UI options, not features themselves.

Well, those case related features are ’GSUB’ substitution features so they are also allowed to interact with themselves. That’s why the UI does not make them mutually exclusive. So ’c2sc’ and ’smcp’ are allowed to be on at the same time though their sum effect might be zero depending on the font design.

it’s missing the ’mkmk’ and ’mark’ for general layout - That is very unfortunate.

I’m advocating getting that fix in an SU but I could really use a Latin font that relies upon those features to add to my support. Any well known candidates you can suggest?

Dan

> it’s missing the

twardoch — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:58:19 -0800

> it’s missing the ’mkmk’ and ’mark’ for general layout

That is very unfortunate.

Is language-dependent processing (the “locl” feature) supported anyhow?

This is a chaos thread

k.l. — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:06:46 -0800

This is a chaos thread anyway ... ;-)

Karsten — would have preferred mutually exclusive options “Upper & Lower Case”, “Upper Case”, “Upper Case & Small Caps”, “Small Caps”
Dan — Actually, it is written (in the OT spec) that these feature shall be permitted to interact with any other ’GSUB’ substitution feature (just need to apply them in the correct order, doh!).

What I refer to is UI options, not features themselves. Mutually exclusive means: among casing options. Of course case-related features should interact with other GSUB features like ’calt’, ’liga’, ’ss01’ etc.

Dan — but if you’re asking if Leopard has full ’GPOS’ processing, the answer is yes.

Yes, this is what I wanted to know. Great!

Many thanks. Karsten

Man, we diverged from the

dannomon — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:33:21 -0800

Man, we diverged from the original topic quite a bit (should have started a new thread “Type issues in MacOS Leopard”). But no matter, I’ll try answering the best I can.

what is Command+B supposed to do in Apple applications?

Well, it’s supposed to do the most sensible, logical thing and switch to a weighted style that also is associated with the style that was previously selected. So if say “Oblique” is selected, doing a Command+B will change the style to “Bold Oblique”. But sometimes it’s not entirely obvious what to change the style to based on the original style. We can do better though and will try.

Does/will OS 10.5 also interpret GPOS features (e.g. ’kern’) with multiple lookups and contextual positioning?

I’m not sure what you mean but if you’re asking if Leopard has full ’GPOS’ processing, the answer is yes. There was an omission in Leopard for my default ’GPOS’ feature list though: it’s missing the ’mkmk’ and ’mark’ for general layout (of course, it’s there for CoreText Arabic if the font has a ’GPOS’). Also, I mentioned it earlier but I should reiterate that we now always use the ’kern’ table if present in a font in lieu of its ’GPOS’.

Hm. Does it mean to get smallcaps from both upper and lowercase one needs to activate two options? I have not seen OS 10.5 yet ...
(Seems I am one of those who would have preferred mutually exclusive options “Upper & Lower Case”, “Upper Case”, “Upper Case & Small Caps”, “Small Caps”. Still wondering why a user would want to select uppercase and smallcaps at the same time.)

Actually, it is written (in the OT spec) that these feature shall be permitted to interact with any other ’GSUB’ substitution feature (just need to apply them in the correct order, doh!). Cheers,

Dan

Apple and CFF: what's the deal?

paul d hunt — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:07:31 -0700

If i remember correctly, someone recently refered to the Mac as being a “marginally Unicode compliant environment” or something to that effect. Why is Apple taking so long to adopt the standard and what is the best way to get around this apparent obstacle? I’m assuming (correct me if i’m wrong) that Apple is still adhering to some glyph naming standard to access glyphs, but which standard is that?