Re: ATSUI, AAT and OpenType
Re: ATSUI, AAT and OpenType
- Subject: Re: ATSUI, AAT and OpenType
- From: Scott Thompson <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 08:06:42 -0500
The following is a quite specific question, but since I didn't find a
dedicated forum for Mac OS X typographic technology anywhere, I
figured that maybe the wisdom of this mailing list might even cover
this topic. :-)
Conventional wisdom says that ATSUI deals only with Apple's own AAT
format as far as typographic features are concerned. I.e. you need an
AAT enhanced font to see any typographic features offered in the
Typography Panel that you can reach from the Action pull-down menu in
Cocoa's Font Panel; OpenType fonts with typographic features in the
OpenType format won't work (the Typography Panel incorrectly reports
"No typographic features in this font").
This is a bad thing because there are thousands of OpenType fonts,
whereas the only AAT enhanced fonts I know of are the ones that come
with Mac OS X.
But anyway, the strange thing is that there *are* a few OpenType fonts
that do work although they do *not* incorporate the AAT table that is
relevant for typographic features (the 'morx' table). These are some
of the Asian Mac OS X system fonts that Apple delivers in CFF (=
PostScript Type 1) OpenType format (*.otf), e.g. the Hiraginu family.
The typographic features in these fonts are clearly encoded in the
OpenType format, and yet the Cocoa Typography Panel displays them.
Now, the question is: in what do these CFF OpenType fonts differ from
the "usual" CFF OpenType fonts that don't work? Does this mean that an
OpenType font that's configured in some specific way will work with
ATSUI?
Does anyone here have any idea/hint/link?
Mac OS X's support for the advanced typography features of OpenType
have been "pending" since long before the OS shipped.
If I had to venture a guess, I would say that in order to render some
double-byte fonts correctly, the font team found it necessary to
support some subset of the Open Type typography tables. Unfortunately
they don't support all the typography tables that make up OpenType so
they can't claim full OpenType support.
Scott
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