[HarfBuzz] [Indic] Inspecting the font for consonant position with Free Sans

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6/3/13 19:19, Bobby de Vos wrote:
> On 2013-03-05 17:58, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>> The problem is: Free Sans has both deva and dev2 tables.  HarfBuzz correctly
>> chooses dev2.  Now, we then proceed to find the base.  For that, we check
>> whether "Virama,RA" matches the blwf feature.  It doesn't.  As such we take RA
>> to be the syllable base, and things go down from there.
>
> Slightly off topic (for which I apologize) what tables should an Indic
> font designer be using for fonts that will be used with Harfbuzz,
> Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8), iOS, OS X, Android, InDesign, etc? Certainly
> I can see putting in new spec tables (ie dev2). Would it be recommended
> to also add old spec tables (ie deva) as well?

If you want to support as many as possible of the targets mentioned 
above, then you need to provide old-spec tables as well - Uniscribe on 
XP, for example, doesn't know about the new tables, nor (IIRC) does 
Adobe's engine.

(I don't recall exactly what's supported by the various versions of OS X 
- until the last couple of major versions, it had little or no Indic 
OpenType shaping support. Of course, AAT support was there.)

But obviously you shouldn't simply copy the same features and lookups 
into both old- and new-spec script tags; the specs are different, after all!

The OpenType list might be a better place for a question like this, btw.

JK