@kenlunde, a subject matter expert who is an endless font of knowledge¹ on the OpenType standard, PostScript, and Adobe's CID font stuff, noticed when going through my TT2020 font's name table that I had non-Unicode strings for the "Macintosh" platform ID (1, 0, 0). This is a legacy format and OS X does not require it; we can understand therefore "Macintosh" there quite literally as referring to the era when people actually called Macs Macintoshes 😉
As people care quite a bit about keeping fonts as small as possible for bandwidth purposes (which is why @dscorbett removed FFTM in #4320), we ought to also stop writing these unnecessary Mac strings.
Obviously I can just hack TT2020's name table after the fact, (I actually just edited the binaries to make my latest release,) but Lunde has been recommending this since at least 2015 (What’s in a ‘name’ (Table)?, 20151107).
So this is a tracking issue for us to stop writing these strings. Does anyone oppose? It's not so difficult, we just delete static void AddMacName from tottf.c. We've already even got a flag for it: ttf_flag_nomacnames.
If some, such as @frank-trampe, wish to be more conservative, I suppose we can just default ttf_flag_nomacnames to on. But these strings really serve no purpose but to bloat the name table unnecessarily, and me thinking they were necessary² led me to write some really ugly code recently…:
https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/TT2020/blob/master/build/version_0.2_patch.py#L16-L22
¹ heh
² Reasonable assumption given they're default even with “Apple” unselected in «Generate…», no?
@kenlunde, a subject matter expert who is an endless font of knowledge¹ on the OpenType standard, PostScript, and Adobe's CID font stuff, noticed when going through my TT2020 font's
nametable that I had non-Unicode strings for the "Macintosh" platform ID (1, 0, 0). This is a legacy format and OS X does not require it; we can understand therefore "Macintosh" there quite literally as referring to the era when people actually called Macs Macintoshes 😉As people care quite a bit about keeping fonts as small as possible for bandwidth purposes (which is why @dscorbett removed FFTM in #4320), we ought to also stop writing these unnecessary Mac strings.
Obviously I can just hack TT2020's
nametable after the fact, (I actually just edited the binaries to make my latest release,) but Lunde has been recommending this since at least 2015 (What’s in a ‘name’ (Table)?, 20151107).So this is a tracking issue for us to stop writing these strings. Does anyone oppose? It's not so difficult, we just delete
static void AddMacNamefromtottf.c. We've already even got a flag for it:ttf_flag_nomacnames.If some, such as @frank-trampe, wish to be more conservative, I suppose we can just default
ttf_flag_nomacnamesto on. But these strings really serve no purpose but to bloat thenametable unnecessarily, and me thinking they were necessary² led me to write some really ugly code recently…:https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/TT2020/blob/master/build/version_0.2_patch.py#L16-L22
¹ heh² Reasonable assumption given they're default even with “Apple” unselected in «Generate…», no?