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16:49:44
scymtym
i mean, the crazy rules get applied transparently if you use fc via ffi, but maybe simple queries work without replicating all that
16:51:05
Shinmera
right, which is what font-discovery does do, but it doesn't expose properties such as preferred hinting.
16:54:17
scymtym
makes sense. i don't have the slightest idea how you could present the full power of OTF to a user anyway. with scripts, features, variations, font collections, even for a single font file, there are so many possible looks
16:57:58
scymtym
i can imagine that. but there is a considerable fraction that uses CFF outlines instead of TTF outlines which requires vastly different behavior in the font loader
17:00:08
Shinmera
you'd think for fonts all you need is a map from codepoint to a set of bezier curves, with some extra info for line height and ligatures, but hey.
17:00:21
scymtym
CFF existed prior to OTF (invented for PDF, i believe). they just added it as a way to represent glyph outlines compactly
17:02:32
scymtym
yeah, in OTF, even dictionary data structures are specified in terms of stack machines where keys are operators and values are operands that get pushed to the stack
17:03:13
Shinmera
I guess someone thought stack machines were the best thing since sliced bread, so why not make everything a stack machine?
17:04:20
scymtym
i /think/ hinting is another full bytecode machine, but the specification just has a hole at that point
17:05:11
Colleen
docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ty... Website (HTML), Title: fpgm - Font program table - Typography | Microsoft Docs
17:05:18
Shinmera
speaking of crazy specs, I was (briefly) looking at parsing colour profiles, and that is another thing that's massively overcomplicated.
17:05:53
Shinmera
I'm not getting into it, I was considering it when I was writing the coloured library.
17:06:17
SAL9000
I tried to figure out that hot mess just from an end-user perspective, was hard enough
17:06:44
SAL9000
"Okay so I have a screen which covers 100% of sRGB, how do I set it and my photo editing software up properly?"
17:09:15
Shinmera
Other things someone (I) should tackle at some point but I'm too horrified to even look at: IMEs, screen readers, DPI detection
17:10:46
SAL9000
on Linux, I *think* X11 has a dpi spec somewhere, plus the major DEs and toolkits each have their own environment variables/gconf/dbus
17:11:00
Shinmera
There's calls to get the DPI setting that the user has set, but that has nothing to do with physical screen size.
17:11:59
Colleen
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exten... Website (HTML), Title: Extended Display Identification Data - Wikipedia
17:12:18
SAL9000
Nothing we can do about those other than best-effort detection and/or relying on user DPI setting
17:13:25
SAL9000
Best-effort can be done by a set of resolution thresholds... ~2K -> 125% scale, ~4K -> 150% scale, >4K -> 175%/200% scale
17:14:05
SAL9000
idea being that it's generally easier for the user to reduce the DPI afterward rather than increasing (because the UI elements may be too small to find the settings panel)
17:14:09
Shinmera
but that's only related to the resolution-scale property it has. It also supports real-world units (cm), which should be unrelated.
17:15:02
SAL9000
but yeah, this is yet another "unsolved problem" on PCs because no-one cared about it enough when the standards were being made
17:15:19
SAL9000
probably because screen resolutions being as high as they are today were not imaginable at the time
17:16:20
SAL9000
maybe the move to high resolution will mean that a lot of the font hinting etc. stuff can be deprecated for contexts other than print?
17:16:44
scymtym
well, there is a justification for most (all?) of it. but they should have started with a clean slate (says the technical person who knows nothing about the effort involved in making fonts)
17:18:31
SAL9000
Basically, high DPI *may* mean that all font design can move in the "display font" direction -- as in, fonts designed to be shown at LARGE sizes -- to some extent
17:19:37
SAL9000
(So-called "display" fonts differ from "normal" fonts in that they are designed for use in titles, level 1 headings etc. -- thinner outlines, smaller features -- which makes sense at, like, >40pt )
17:47:30
Shinmera
I'm streaming some pixel work for Kandria for the next two hours: https://stream.shinmera.com
17:47:30
Colleen
stream.shinmera.com/ Website (HTML), Title: Shinmera's Stream | Video Games, Art, and Programming