Talk:OpenType

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

several unique options which enhance the fonts typographical abilities and fonts can have advanced typographic features, which allow proper typographic treatment of complex languages, and advanced typographic effects for simpler languages Is this an anecdote or an article with information?

Contents

[edit] Para 1 correction?

there are over 7,000 fonts available in OpenType format, with Adobe's library making up for about 1/3 of the total.

I believe you mean "making up about one third"--comprising--rather than "making up for..."--compensating.

  • I think you are correct. I deleted the extraneous word "for". In the future, you are welcome to be bold and make such changes yourself. JDLH | Talk 23:26, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Link to www.fontshop.com - drop or keep?

On November 21, 2005, 194.208.119.18 made this change: "removed link to fontshop.com: nothing opentype-specific here, just general font-topic and custom made fonts (ad?)". The text they removed was under External Links:

Is this deletion appropriate, or should the link be restored?

Arguments for the deletion being appropriate:

  • Fontshop.com is a font vending site
  • this is the most commercial link of the External Links set

Arguments for restoring the link:

  • Fontshop.com does have a category of OpenType fonts, letting you see a wide selection of OpenType examples
    • By this argument, we should also put in a link to http://www.adobe.com/type/ and other font vendors with OpenType products and information about their characteristics
  • this link has been in the page for a fairly long time; it was added on 2005-08-31 11:57:28 by User:Schawel
  • this link is definitely relevant to the page, and definitely not blatant link-farming

Your thoughts?

  • If there's no further comments in a week or so, I think I'll restore the link. Unfortunately, I can't get through to the person who made the change, since they didn't have a user ID. JDLH | Talk 17:37, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  • The link wasn't restored, but it shouldn't be. FontShop is not among the leading makers or sellers of OpenType fonts, either in volume or involvement in the OpenType community. They were not particularly early adopters, and there is little to distinguish them from at least a dozen other font makers as far as OpenType is concerned. There are many other commercial links that would make more sense, and those links aren't here either. The FontShop people are nice folks, they make some good fonts, and I wish them well - but there's little logic to having a FontShop link here. Thomas Phinney 6:15, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Adobe products

I am one of the senior technical support team at Monotype. Twice I have written that Adobe CS products and above are the only adobe products compatible with opentype and twice its been removed, can some one explain why this is? sailor iain 08:30, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

____

Because your statement is incorrect. InDesign, for example, supported OpenType fonts and features from its first version.

Strebe 05:08, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

____

First, if you want to know which Adobe applications are not compatible with OpenType, it's listed in Adobe's OpenType readme, here: http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/OTReadMe.html#Anchor-22064.

Besides the fact that it's wrong either way, this is a common misrepresentation, to say that an application is only "compatible with OpenType" when it takes advantage of the additional features of OpenType. There's a big difference between a font not working, and it not having automatic ligatures and easily-accessed small caps. If you want to know which Adobe applications support which OpenType layout features, see the chart on the last page of Adobe's OpenType User Guide, here: http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/OTGuide.pdf (you'll see that the list includes InDesign 1 and 2 and Photoshop 6 and 7, all before the CS products).

Thomas Phinney 07:21, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

in my view, "OpenType support" should mean "full OpenType support". Anything else is "partial support". I am frustrated by applications touting OT support, and then failing to support the feature I happen to need. Right now, I am interested in proper diacritics handling (mark, mkmk) and vertical kerning. I don't know a single word processor who does that, even Mellel (which has above average OT support). Are there any applications that fully support the OT standard, at all? which ones? It seems incredibly annoying to have such a standard in place for 10 years(!) without a single implementation. dab (ᛏ) 07:49, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Flavors" of OpenType?

Can someone add some info about "flavors" of OpenType. Using Linotype FontExplorer X, when I do a get info on a typeface, some display "Opentype (PostScript flavor)". What does this mean? --24.249.108.133 16:28, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

As the article says, "An OpenType font can include either TrueType outlines or PostScript-style outlines (the latter stored in the Compact Font Format with Type 2 charstrings (CFF)." PostScript flavor probably refers to the font having PostScript-style outlines. TrueType flavor probably refers to a font having TrueType outlines. I'll revise the wording of the article to make this clearer. --Jdlh | Talk 20:13, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The section on Mac OS X support

This section seems to me to be too general and dated.. It seems to only be talking about low level Mac OS X APIs and not the Cocoa Text System that most new applications interact with. Apple’s AAT and ATSUI are only small part of the Mac OS "X text handling classes. My experience with the Cocoa text system is that iit is far more advanced than anything else I've seen for text. I'm thinking of adding something to clarify this, but I wanted to see if the original authors are still here and can provide some clarification. Indexheavy 09:01, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Agree with previous poster. In addition a general update according to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is needed. Mlewan (talk) 22:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Large List

Much of the article is made up of long lists of tags. Does anyone think it would make sense to give the tags their own article? The lists make the article really long.

Besides, I feel the list of tags doesn't really fit with the article. The article is there to give people an overview of the Open Type format - the list is more specific then that. It disrupts the overview with very technical information. If we moved the lists to a new page, we could unify the topic of this article, while giving the list of tags a place where it can be more organized. Nlm1515 22:07, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

My rough guess is that the tags lists make up 1/3 of the vertical height of the article. I don't think that's excessive. One intermediate option is to add markup to put the tags lists into two columns. Now, on the other hand, I've had experience where taking a list out of the main article and making it a separate "List of" article really helped the list improve. So I won't fight against making a "List of" article. Note there are really two lists: list of layout tags in OpenType spec, and lists of tags supported and not supported by OS X. I could imagine that someday someone would want to add the list of tags supported and not supported by other text layout engines, such as those in Windows Vista, or Adobe InDesign, or FreeType. --Jdlh | Talk 22:30, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Script tags

Are script tags compatible to ISO 15924? Christoph Päper (talk) 11:29, 19 January 2008 (UTC)