[OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction

[Nicolas Spalinger]

>> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978909/
>>
>> This article says that a regression was introduced by security update
>> 961371. The regression imposes an artificial 2,500 character length
>> limitation on strings that are contained in OpenType or TrueType fonts.
>> They mean 2.5K Unicode characters, or 5000 bytes.
>>
>> A subsequent security update, 972270, has restored the character length
>> limitation for individual strings to 64 KB (32,768 Unicode characters),
>> matching the OpenType specification.
>>
>> Carry on embedding!
> 
> 
> Hey that was quick :-)
> Thanks for researching this and posting the precise details!
> 
> Good to know the bug was fixed. Thanks to the MS folks for their efforts
> in getting this resolved.
> 
> We can carry on metadata-ing as well :-)
> And adjust the checks in the open font design toolkit.

Fontforge's new stable release has this in the changelog
(http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/changelog.html#change-log)

" Some time ago MS put in a patch to their OS so that they would refuse
to load a font with a name table >5K. They have now decided that was an
error http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978909/ And have removed the
limitation.

So remove the warning ff used to generate about name tables bigger than
5K. "


So no need to resort to mangling the metadata to make things "work"
again because of this Windows-only limitation and deviation from the
published spec.

For example line 26 to 42 in
http://github.com/garrickvanburen/Fontue/blob/master/workflow/fontforge_font_optimizer.pe
should be dropped. The better solution is not stripping away metadata
but getting upstream to fix such mistakes. Seriously, replacing official
metadata the authors themselves have put in with garbage isn't exactly
very nice. Quite clearly copyright infringement and breach of licenses.
Certainly not the way to get open font designers to respect you. Please
don't do it ever.

Cheers,


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 260 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/attachments/20100508/3de79bf2/attachment.pgp>