Re: Auto selecting optical sizes for a font

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 6/24/2013 12:28 AM, Georg Duffner wrote:
> Am 22.06.2013 16:57, schrieb Hans Hagen:
>
>> We have no feature 'size' (or I must have forgotten about it). As
>> there is no consistency in designsizes and there is always some
>> esthetic choice involved no automatic mechanism is (and will be)
>> build in.
>
> Hi,
>
> There is a 'size' table in opentype fonts which contains informations
> about the design size, the design range and a style-ID and -name. Fonts
> that come with different optical sizes do in fact use that table exactly
> for the purpose desired by Andrés. Latin Modern does so, Adobe fonts do
> so and EB Garamond happens to use that table too. XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX
> interpret it correctly (by means of fontspec, IIRC). So perhaps it’s
> worth reconsidering this.

It's too much trouble for the few fonts that come in design sizes. As 
typescripts need to be defined adding the bit of extra info is no 
problem. I had a look at the relevant info and in order to make it work 
with the context font loader (the name driven one, as for files it is 
irrelevant anyway) quite some fuzzy logic has to be applied: we need a 
proper way (at least in context) to identify regular, italic, bold 
italic etc combined with the font name and the fact that names (as well 
as modifiers) are poluted makes that for lm a different logic has to be 
applied than for eb and if I don't do some filtering we get an 
inconsistent lot of of antykwas being seen as a design size collection 
as well.  I just tried to make a an auto-internal-goodie generator and 
some tracing showed me that if we can get 50% done right, we need to 
work around the other 50%. (I have lots of fonts on my system).

So for the moment I'll stick to providing goodies files. After all, 
users load a relevant typescript anyway so much gets hidden. If we get 
dozens of design sized files I'll look into it again.

Hans


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