[CREATE] otf•UI product vision, warm off the press...

[peter sikking]

Dave wrote:

I have really taken a day or so to think about this, so
that the reasonable answer could bubble up.

> I suggest
> 
> - replacing openType with OpenType throughout.

yeah, fair enough.

> - removing "make their texts communicate better and to”

that snippet is rather important to me,  it is really a
different kettle of fish than “refine their texts’ aesthetic
and typographical qualities.”

it moves on from the, to put it bluntly, decorative, which
any cold-hearted boor will give exactly zero seconds consideration
(‘nice to have’). what we are trying to make clear is that there are
cases where otf make a difference between communicating successfully
or not (a financial report where the numbers to not line up in columns
is unreadable).

now that I have written that, I know I have to put it
better in the vision.

btw: thinking through this, I do believe that the way the
character entry – character encoding – standard font tables +
mandatory (automatic) otf has come about, there are no cases
where user-controllable otf _must_ be used to get just the
correct glyph to display.

if I am wrong about this, I would really appreciate a chat with
an expert in this field.

> - distinguishing 2 classes of end-users, general public (eg slide deck editors like LibreOffice) and typographers (eg Scribus users)

of course that was in my notes, but during the writing of the
vision I noticed that typographers are (duh) part of ‘everyone’
and I could not come up with any value that has to be delivered
to them that is _different_ than the ones named for everyone.
(typographer _may_ need a different UI design than ‘general public’,
but I can tell you that… when I get there).

I am open to hearing about extra/special value for typographers
(would be cool to have that clear).

updated vision:

<start>
The OpenType-features UI project (otf•UI) is an infrastructure project closely tied to Harfbuzz. It aims to drag the user-controllable OpenType features out of obscurity and make them generally, and consistently, available. All platforms where Harfbuzz is used—desktop, tablet and handheld—are in scope.

Direct users of otf•UI are application developers. They get clear-cut and feasible solutions for integrating OpenType features with their text-editing capabilities, without the need to obtain OpenType/typographical domain knowledge.

End-users of otf•UI are anyone editing rich text. They get the capabilities to control the difference between a successfully communicating text and one that doesn’t, and to refine texts’ aesthetic and typographical qualities.
<stop>


    --ps

        designs interaction for creatives +
        solutions with a wide impact on society

        teacher, mentor, author, lecturer
        http://mmiworks.net/peter