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

[Dave Crossland]

On 21 September 2015 at 07:12, peter sikking <peter at mmiworks.net> wrote:

>
> > - 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.
>

Okay cool


> 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.


I think this depends on what you mean by "correct" glyphs; for example,
tabular numbers may not be the default, instead proportional numbers, and
in that case the unicode for the numbers will not result in a table that
lines up in cols. I think 'unreadable' is an overstatement, but if true
then I suppose it follows that this is  case where user control must be
exercised to get to the 'correct' result.

(Of course, a program could have some 'smart' features to activate optional
OpenType features when available, such as detecting a col of numbers, the
availability of a tnum feature in the font, and thus activating it.)


> > - 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).


I agree its possible a single solution can work so worth waiting to see how
the UI turns out

-- 
Cheers
Dave
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