Andreas Delmelle wrote:
If I judge correctly, taking full advantage of CFF would mean that, instead of just asking the font what the width is of a single given char, we would pass it a sequence of chars and rely on the font code to figure out the impact of merging/ligatures etc.
While I wrote a quick CFF parser for TTFSubSetFile (more of a false start, altho potentially useful for getting away from WinANSI), I haven't looked at the Type 2 spec in great detail.
Given how lackluster OpenType support is in most applications to this day, I wonder how many foundries are going to include such complex features as advanced kerning. I didn't even try to parse the charstrings or grok the added Type 2 operators. Altho it shouldn't be too hard to write a rudimentary charstring parser to get some idea of which fonts do and don't have this info. At first glance, the FontShop guys seem to be pretty great at utilising the OpenType features to their fullest, but…
I don't have a real need because I simply don't have particularly complex formatting needs. It's all English, and mostly tabular layouts. Nothing demanding.
- alex
