Document relevant discussion venues

[lianghai]

I think it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about some mostly harmless documentation projects.

For one, I was frustrated the other during Behdad’s talk by how many mailing lists are there for the OpenType spec / Open Font Format standard (ISO/IEC 14496-22) alone… Let’s document all of them, including both the current and past ones, active and never-took-flight ones, mailing lists and forums, etc.

I’m currently aware of the following addresses, but it’ll be helpful to draft some “editor’s notes” kind of introductory paragraphs as well:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Behdad also mentioned a Yahoo! Groups and a Google Groups attempts.

There are also a lot forums out there having some technical discussions, although not specifically for the OT/OFF. We can either create a new issue (meaning, a separate documentation effort) for them or simply increase this issue’s scope. I assume it will be too hard to draw a line.

[davelab6]

The mpeg-otspec list was started by importing the Yahoo Groups list archives.

In https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2020-August/001871.html unspoooled a few others:

1. meta discussions about how to make font format spec updates - [on mpeg-otspec list], on
   Twitter.com, and TypeDrawers.com.

2. editorial change ideas happening [on mpeg-otspec list] and in
   https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/typography-issues/issues and
   https://www.commontype.org .

3. technical change ideas happening [on mpeg-otspec list] and in
   https://github.com/opentype ,
   https://github.com/commontype-standard ,
   https://github.com/be5invis/OTVAR-ZVAR-Table ,
   https://github.com/microsoft/OpenTypeDesignVariationAxisTags ,
   https://github.com/googlefonts/colr-gradients-spec and
   https://github.com/microsoft/OpenType-XVAR-proposal .

4. efforts to consolidate the 'script development specs' such as
   https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/script-development/bengali from
   MS,
   https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents/ from Nathan Willis,
   https://github.com/typotheque/text-shaping from Liang Hai, and related
   tools like
   https://bitbucket.org/LindenbergSW/fontdoctools/src/master/R%C3%B6ntgen.md
   from Norbert Lindenberg.

[davelab6]

I guess the GF axis registry and AOTS are also relevant, plus fonttools and harfbuzz docs and sources, DWrite docs, Apple TrueType and CoreText docs.

Tiro website has in an obscure files folder dump area a treasure trove of presentation PDFs.

DecoType presentations are also gems but harder to come by.

Unicode Conference and even TUG Conference and TUGBoat archives.

A few "big old books" published by O'reilly, by Yannis and Ken; and Tal's OpenType Cook Book and Simon's Font and Text Book websites.

[lianghai]

(Let’s just dump all the possibly relevant information here before categorizing.)

Forums of font editors:

• FontLab: https://forum.fontlab.com
• Glyphs: https://forum.glyphsapp.com
• RoboFont: https://forum.robofont.com

cc @ctrlcctrlv: What’s the scene of FontForge? This mailing list seems to be where its user discussions take place, right?

And there are several font-related Google Groups I still subscribe to:

• fonttools, “Developer and user discussion of fonttools tree at https://github.com/behdad/fonttools”
• UAFDKOML, “An unofficial list dedicated to the Adobe FDK and .fea file syntax.”
• Google Fonts Discussions, “This group is for discussing the development of fonts available from Google Fonts (www.google.com/fonts) / Related discussions also happen in https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/early-access-fonts and https://github.com/google/fonts/issues and the font projects' own github source repositories.”

Wow, I hope we get to gradually converge some of these and don’t just create one more fragment…

[alerque]

TypeDrawers comes to mind as another place a lot of discussion happens. A lot of it is type design related, but technical stuff goes by all the time too.

[tiroj]

TypeDrawers was specifically identified by the variations working group as the preferred forum for discussing variations technology in the period following the publication of OT 1.8. The forum was actively monitored by Peter Constable and some other working group members to respond to questions about the format.

Recently, it seems to have become a place in which Microsoft announces new VTT releases and, hence, a place to discuss TrueType hinting.

[tiroj]

Tiro website has in an obscure files folder dump area a treasure trove of presentation PDFs.

That's here.

We'll maintain that folder as is when our new website is launched, to keep links alive, but I'll also figure out a way to make the content less obscure in our new blog.

[Lorp]

More places where discussion happens:

• Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO) https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/afdko/
• CSS Working Group Specifications https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts — issues with prefix “[css-fonts]”

[NorbertLindenberg]

A Slack group started by Erin McLaughlin and adopted by the Unicode Consortium:
https://unicode-org.slack.com/

A document I put together because the implementors didn‘t provide documentation I needed as a font engineer: Support for Brahmic scripts in OpenType font rendering

[davelab6]

@ctrlcctrlv what's the latest on fontforge?

[ctrlcctrlv]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. The project is essentially in maintenance mode right now but that could change if somebody submits a big pull request. We will have a new release in November, it contains some SVG bug fixes and bug fixes to other areas. I have not looked at the commit list but I don't think there's any new feature, and I'm sure there's no major new feature. Of course, both the FontForge mailing list and issue tracker are places of discussion of OpenType. I try to answer every new issue and I post on the mailing list occasionally as well. The users are still using it and regardless of the lack of development activity users are not tiring of it.

[lianghai]

I’ve broaden this issue’s topic a bit, but I feel it may still be helpful to draw a line between discussion venues (forums, mailing lists, …) and projects (tooling, documentation, …). I’ve created a new issue for the latter: #18

@ctrlcctrlv, thanks. I’ll probably just include both the devel and users lists as listed on the page:

fontforge-announce: Used by me to announce changes to fontforge
fontforge-devel: Bug reports, feature requests, etc.
fontforge-testcases: A means to send large fonts to me without cluttering up -devel
fontforge-users: Discussion area for users

[lianghai]

Just realized there are also meetups/conferences like: https://type-tech.net/