I had a chance to have a short look at it.
This spec consists of three parts: general architecture, ways to code it
(Interchange format) and Glyph shape representation.
I don't think we care about part 3 too much.
Part 2 tells about ASN and SGML coding and minimum font resources and should
be easy to understand.
Part 1 is the main description of the architecture and the structures and
parameters. This would be the main reference.
I have some comments and questions:
1. I want to find out how much this spec is a living spec. Where is it used?
I would not called it exactly Windows conform, although that shouldn't be
our only view.
Perhaps some people from operating systems and/or font development have some
more info.
Motoyama-san, what do you know about that? Are you working with it
regularly?
Can somebody provide a DTD and an XML file based on that DTD?
2. the spec is from the early nineties. A bigger part of the architecture is
handling font classification, which nowadays is realized by Panose in many
environments. I favor Panose.
3. Unicode is not mentioned in the sections I have seen.
4. I do not find anything about character sets in the spec, neither of
operating systems nor of devices.
5. The spec seems to be stronger concerning alignments of international
characters.
6. Parameters looks somehow familiar, although I haven't studied in detail
yet.
I have to study more, but my conclusion up to now is:
We will not fulfill the spec 100%, as today's requirements are not all
covered. So we will not be compatible.
The question is whether we want to lean towards it. What advantages would
that have? What extra effort (at least reading and thinking about it and
then comparing in detail, what we can take over)?
We may want to decide that in the very near future. But we need more info
and a broader base for the decision.
Norbert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 27 2000 - 11:31:50 EST