[smufl-discuss] Re: Stylistic Alternates

[dspreadbury]

Joe wrote:

> I have done some more research on web support for OpenType features, and I am
> concerned that many of your favored approaches for SMuFL rely on OpenType
> stylistic alternates. These are not generally supported in HTML today in
> a consistent fashion and, as usual for the web, it is not easy to know when
> that date will arrive.

As I've said, I believe that the use of stylistic alternates is appropriate, given that using stylistic alternates does not prevent us from encoding any such alternate glyphs at explicit codepoints, such that they can be accessed by any API that can summon a glyph by way of its codepoint, which I believe certainly includes HTML, SVG and Canvas.

The reason I think stylistic alternates have value is that they make various advanced things (e.g. designing different versions of symbols for different optical sizes) optional for font designers who want to create SMuFL-compliant fonts and for consuming applications that don't want to worry about these issues. I am only proposing the use of stylistic alternates where there are several equivalent versions of the same symbol (e.g. string numbers using digits with serifs or sans serif digits), and I am only proposing the use of ligatures where they are genuinely ligatures (e.g. "mp", "ff", etc.).

In all the cases I have proposed, music is rendered perfectly intelligibly without the use of any stylistic alternates or ligatures. Applications that are built using APIs that do provide access to OpenType features can take advantage of such features, and even those applications that are built using APIs that do not provide such direct access are not excluded, if font developers follow the guideline to additionally encode alternate glyphs at explicit codepoints.

Daniel

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