On 2016-09-27 at 21:27:07 +0200, Martin Schröder wrote: > 2016-09-27 21:19 GMT+02:00 William Adams <[email protected]>: > > Congratulations! And thank you --- we run an invoicing system > > here which would've been a lot more difficult to code up w/o > > being able to use lualatex for some of the calculations. > > > > Hate to be all Oliver Twist, but if I may make the first extended > > 1.0 feature request --- support for OpenType Variations? > > > > > > https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-opentype-variable-fonts-12ba6cd2369#.w0qlxz76u > > > > http://fontbureau.typenetwork.com/news/article/opentype-font-variations-open-up-a-world-of-possibilities > > > > http://practicaltypography.com/the-scorpion-express.html > > Having read your first and last source, I'm not so sure we should > rush this.
I don't think that significant changes in LuaTeX are required. Since the glyf table is unchanged, I assume that the additional information is in a new table which has to be converted to Lua as well. When the new stuff appears in the Lua representation of an OpenType font, new glyph outlines can be created by pure Lua code. There is no need to change LuaTeX itself in order to make use of the new features. Admittedly, I don't know how OTFs are converted to Lua. If the fontforge library is used in order to parse OTF, we have to wait for an update anyway. I agree with William that "OpenType Variations" is a big step forward. I always missed something like that. We have zillions of serif and sans-serif fonts but only very few typewriter fonts. It would be nice to be able to adapt the weight of a \tt font in order to make it compatible with a particular text font. I liked Adobe's first approach, "multiple master fonts". The MM font format extended Type 1 by simply replacing coordinates (numbers) with equations. Though it was an elegant solution, this approach was sentenced to fail because one of the most important features of Type 1 fonts is that no fully-fledged PostScript interpreter is required for rendering. All existing programs (except Ghostscript) expected coordinates to be numbers and didn't know what to do with equations. The "OpenType Variations" approach is much better because it's a usual OTF with additional information. We can either ignore the new features or make use of them. Martin, there is no need to do something in a hurry indeed. It will take some time until fonts with the new fetures are available. I'm convinced that LuaTeX will be one of the first programs which will support "OpenType Variations", just due to its flexibility. Regards, Reinhard -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:[email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------
