[Openfontlibrary] Font site wishlist

[Ed Trager]

On 10/30/06, Raph Levien <raph.levien at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Of course, I'm going to be implementing my own font format in the
> coming year or two, so there are lots of questions about coordinating
> that. What I've got so far is very simple, based on s-expressions, but
> I think I should take another look at ufo, for the sake of not
> reinventing the wheel too much.
>

Having only just taken a first look at UFO, it looks pretty good to
me.  Why not just consider adding to the UFO format if it is lacking
in places instead of inventing a new format?  I don't see what a new
format will really do for you, or for anyone else.

If I were going to write an AJAX-based interactive font editor
however, I think I would --for the purposes of such an application
only-- drill the XML down to one-letter tags whereever possible to
reduce bandwidth consumption and improve responsiveness.  For example,
instead of having:

<glyph name="A">
  <advance width="487"/>
  <unicode hex="0041"/>
  <outline>
    <contour>
      <point x="243" y="681" type="move" name="top"/>
    </contour>
    ...
  </outline>
</glyph>

(152 bytes)

... I would boil this down to something like this:

<g n="A">
  <a w="487"/>
  <u h="0041"/>
  <o>
    <c>
      <p x="243" y="681" t="move" n="top"/>
    </c>
    ...
  </o>
</g>

(90 bytes)

which achieves about 40% savings in bandwidth ... but again I would
only do this for the application's "private" communication between the
client and server  Any "public" communication --such as saving out
font files for public consumption-- would expand back out to the
full-blown UFO XML spec.

Best - Ed