[HarfBuzz] Arabic and diacritics: problems with Arial and Arial Unicode

[Adam Twardoch (List)]

On 11-07-12 02:07, Andrew Cunningham wrote:
> Personally I would expect Times New Roman 3.x fonts to have non-zero
> advances ... but would expect Times New Roman 5.x fonts to have zero
> advances.
I believe that the Microsoft Typography team is very concerned with
metric backwards compatibility of their core fonts. Since Arial and
Times New Roman have been in development for a very long time, they
carry a lot of backwards-baggage, which is unlikely to be "fixed"
because that might potentially cause reflow in some documents that use
those fonts when the user upgrades to a new OS. And no reflow is one of
Microsoft's priorities, at least in the Office team. 

For the same reason kerning was never added to Verdana Italic, Bold and
Bold Italic, because those fonts errornously shipped without kerning
with Internet Explorer 4. So only Verdana Regular has kerning, and it's
very likely to stay that way. 

Best,
Adam

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May success attend your efforts,
-- Adam Twardoch
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