[CREATE] Colorfont Workshop results

[Dave Crossland]

On 29 June 2012 17:26, Hin-Tak Leung <hintak at ghostscript.com> wrote:
>
> fontspec is nice, but rather tied into XeTeX?

The important thing is that XeTeX is libre software. Nasty hack, but
you can import PDFs made with XeTeX into Scribus frames ;-)

XeTeX is helped a lot today by www.tug.org/texworks and I used XeTeX
rather than Scribus for my development of Cantarell :-)

SIL has developed some nice (sadly, as yet unpublished) XeTeX type
design development document-tools too. The idea is that the
document-tool inspects the font and generates a document based on
properties of the font itself - ie, generate immersive-reading
typography with words that include every letter combination possible
given the characters existing in the font, so that the spacing and
kerning can be thoroughly checked.

If Scribus supported OT features, one could create such software for
Scribus with python scripting to test all OT feature combinatorial
possibilities :-)

For Scribus to support OT features, it need only take advantage of the
QT text shaping, which is based on
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz...

> One other thing Ricardo might want to check out is
> Pango... anyway, there is a lot text-layout expertise
> in the TeX/LaTeX community, the web-browser (pango...)...

...so its Harfbuzz that is relevant here, not Pango, since Pango's
OpenType support is delegated to Harfbuzz.

http://behdad.org/text/ explains some of the history here, but it is
now rather out of date...

Behdad, do you plan to update that document? :-)

> emacs 24 seems to have gained the ability to do
> Right-to-left directions i.e. displaying arabic/hebrew
> the way it is intended.

That uses m17n, which is a non-OpenType complex script font format.
Used only by emacs. :-)

> I also seem to remember some W3C specs/RFCs about fonts somewhere...

W3C has the CSS3 Fonts module, and the WOFF format.

The WOFF format is just compression, and doesn't effect OpenType features.

The CSS3 Font module specifies ways to access OpenType features and
browsers are - as Ricardo said - slowly implementing this. Microsoft
is leading here - MSIE10 will have full OpenType support - and Firefox
trailing them.

-- 
Cheers
Dave