[CREATE] OpenType features•UI research notes /2

[peter sikking]

tl;dr: plenty of fascinating facts are being uncovered, collaborations are formed with key players, but this project is fully on hold until a budget is found for it.


notes of interest from my OpenType features workshop at the
TYPO labs conference (top font tool & type technology people present)
and further talks during TYPO berlin, e.g. with Yves Peters, who
instigated the OTF revolt, and John Hudson, who plays an active
role in the specification process.

- more reasons for including discretionary OTF:
 - type designer can not make a choice which design for a glyph is better: create one or more alternates (peter says: bad design);
 - to make the font more valuable;
 - type designer designed some glyphs with real character (no pun), but fears this may hinder market acceptance of the font; solution: font by default has bland, MOR glyphs, character glyphs are alternates via features.

- serious number: a font engineer surveyed an extensive font library and found that “40%” of all glyphs were tied to discretionary OTF.

- another serious number: an informal survey of type foundries found that “three-quarter” had labeled their stylistic sets—something that does not show up in adobe apps.

- gotcha #1: stylistic sets are not mutually exclusive; this raises the current count of potential discretionary OTF to support from 52 to 71 (not counting the 99 character variants that can be defined beyond that for any character);
gotcha #1.1: implementation chaos; some treat stylistic sets as mutually exclusive, some not; a decision on this could be clarified in the standard.

- gotcha #2: do not forget that the small caps and petite caps feature can combine with the numbers features to give more combinations; and then there is the default, that does not need to be any of the cap/lowercase × lining/proportional combinations.

- not funny: to learn that a lot of stylistic sets are wasted to change the glyph of exactly one character.

- Yves Peters’ initial and ultimate goal was and is to bring OTF to everyone. he is completely aligned with our project and will support when we go ahead. he has a cache of typographers’ wishes and proposals, built between him and colleagues over the last years, which could be filtered and analysed for research insights of that side of things. we agreed to link up when my project gets the go-ahead.

- when the OTF revolt broke out, Adobe jumped in; that is 2 years ago. since one year nothing has been seen or heard from Adobe, also not by their ‘advisory board.’ people think impetus has fizzled out at adobe; no people/budget for this left; no consistent UI is expected across their disparate apps. this actually helps us, because the ‘let adobe do it’ route looks dead.

- the OTF set of tags is not a well-designed system. it is more a car crash between two sets of different ideas. some cleaning up of the resulting set of tags has already taken place. a further clean-up and clarification of tags is seen as a natural companion to the UI design project.

- just about everyone is very enthusiastic about bringing OTF to the global population, except
a) people involved in the OTF spec; their head explodes when thinking about UI for all apps (that is a problem I can solve—the UI I mean ;^) and
b) the managers of the few companies that have a global reach and reap the benefits of fonts-being-used-to-their-full-potential; they claim it is impossible for them to sign off a budget for this.

this project is now fully on hold. no speculative work is going to be done until a budget has become available. 


    --ps

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

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