Easily using small caps

. For instance, solving the problem of Arabic and Indic is not possible without solving the problem of supporting smart shaping in page markups.

What "problem" would that be?

Mac OS X Server 10.5 has features that suggest some of the same.

Like what exactly? Can you provide any online references regarding "smart shaping in page markups"?

ATypI 2008 in St Petersburg is to debate smart shaping for page markups.

Where would that be on the program?

http://www.atypi.org/05Petersburg/20_mainprogram

Where would that be on the program?

'The war over web fonts' moderated by Roger Black.

The War over Web Fonts

<Edited by Moderator>

My guess is that engineers built the code to calculate styled characters but that it was decided not to use it to take care of intellectual property.

As it is just a guess, I will try to get infos from Apple.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE jeudi 31 juillet 2008 11:27:07)

'The war over web fonts' moderated by Roger Black.

http://www.atypi.org/05Petersburg/20_main_program/view_presentationhtml?presentid=444

I don't think that has anything to do with "smart shaping in page markups." It appears to concern the well-known technology of font embedding, which has been in use in MS products for 10 years via the special .eot font format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_OpenType

More recently Safari 3 has added support for CSS @font-face which can allow any ordinary font to be downloaded from a server by that browser and used to display text on a page:

http://typographica.org/001112.php

I imagine the main debate would be about protecting intellectual property rights.

Neither of these technologies involve tags in markup for shaping as far as I know -- they are just ways for users to access fonts they do not have installed on their machine. But perhaps you have other info.

Tom Gewecke wrote:
I imagine the main debate would be about protecting intellectual property rights.

At least, it's the way I see it.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE jeudi 31 juillet 2008 12:44:14)

Håkon Wium Lie is Chief Technology Officer for Opera on Oslo. Support for obligatory simple shaping in SFNT-housed fonts was what he was talking about in the past and more recently he has been talking about support for optional smart shaping in SFNT-housed fonts.

The Unicode idea was to do as much as possible in glyph space and as little as possible in character space by using a powerful graphics model while the ISO 10646 idea was to make the character model more independent of the differences between non-graphics models and graphics models.

This, for instance, is why there are Presentation Forms for Arabic. These were ignored in Apple TrueType 2, as per posts by the TrueType team at the time, and the recommendation today is to ignore them in order to do the shaping in glyph space solely.

Latin ligation is at this point supposed to be supported in Firefox - there are some people talking about whether or not they should insert ZERO WIDTH JOINER and ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER to make their HTML unsearchable by any living soul.

Stanley Morison said that the art of typography is multiplication, simply. The passage is in A Tally of Types with wood engravings by Reynolds Stone, printed by Brooke Crutchley who was Printer to the University of Cambridge, privately published in December 1953 as a Christmas keepsake.

Worth reading.

hh

Henrik Holmegaard wrote:
Svenska Akademien that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature began as an effort by Carl Linnæus, Lars Salvius and others to try to introduce spelling and setting more in agreement with the academies of England and France, and less with German printers in Sweden.

This is off topic, but I think you may mix up Svenska Akademin with Kungliga Vetenskapsakademin. Both Linnæus and Salvius were dead and buried when Svenska Akademin was founded.

Håkon Wium Lie is Chief Technology Officer for Opera on Oslo. Support for obligatory simple shaping in SFNT-housed fonts was what he was talking about in the past and more recently he has been talking about support for optional smart shaping in SFNT-housed fonts.

So where can I find some info on what he was talking about? Everything I have found so far would seem to indicate that "smart shaping in page markups" exists only in your imagination, but that can't be completely true I think.

PS It would also be helpful if you could explain what it is you think you have seen in OS X 10.5 server which could have something to do with "smart shaping in page markups."

indicate that "smart shaping in page markups" exists only in your imagination

Try searching for Firefox, ligature, OpenType, AAT. Being a bit polite might improve matters.

hh

Try searching for Firefox, ligature, OpenType, AAT.

I am well aware of the ability of some browsers to display ligatures -- Opera for Mac was able to do it long before Firefox.

This does not say anything at all about tags for smart shaping in page markup, which certainly do not exist now, but which you seem to believe are being proposed or considered somewhere. I was hoping that you could provide a link to whatever information it is that underlies that belief.

It is difficult to determine why Dr James King has not written a blog on the subject of synthesising character data from glyph data after the character data has either been corruped in the font file or has been lost in the conversion from the internal data structures of an application into PS or PDF. Perhaps the problem is that if the blog were written, important as it is said to be to do so, it would challenge the belief popularised by Adobe Systems.

Although as far as Apple Incorporated is concerned fair is fair - since the introduction of OS X 10.5 there is no longer advertising either of invertibility ("Search PDF ...") or of interactivity ("Search Unicode names and Unicode IDs").

Reference :

http://blogs.adobe.com/insidepdf/2007/12/isoballot_for_pdf_17passed.html

This is off topic, but I think you may mix up Svenska Akademin with Kungliga Vetenskapsakademin.

True, by the bye the reference is Lillemor Santesson, Tryckt hos Salvius, Lunds Universitet.

hh

I'm not sure what your post relates to, as we were discussing html rather than pdf, but to summarize, here is my own understanding of the situation regarding "smart shaping in page markup."

+ Neither web font embedding nor browser display of ligatures involve smart shaping in page markup.

+ There is nothing in OS X Server 10.5 that relates to smart shaping in page markup.

+ Correct browser display of Unicode Arabic and Indic is no problem at present and does not require smart shaping in page markup.

+There are no proposals to add tags for smart shaping to current markup standards.

Of course this understanding can change if new information becomes available.

PS Regarding PDF, if you have not seen it already, you may be interested in this Typophile thread on the web font embedding issue, especially the most recent postings:

http://www.typophile.com/node/47629