Subject: [Justfont] CSS support for font collections

From: Ken Lunde <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2016 19:56:31 +0000

All,

Chris Lilley asked me to forward to this mailing list a point I made on the [email-masked] mailing list about indexing fonts in a font collection in the context of CSS.

below is the specific two-paragraph excerpt:

> The latter method will be more reliable, because it doesn't depend on the order of the fonts within the collection, which have the potential to change over time, especially if additional fonts are added. A good real-world example of this is the forthcoming HK (Hong Kong) support for Source Han Sans (Adobe) and Noto Sans CJK (Google) that will add HK versions of the fonts to the collection, both weight-specific and the Super OTCs. These additional fonts will not be appended, but rather inserted, at least for the Super OTCs.
> 
> Come to think of it, this actually happened to the SuperOTCs in Version 1.002 when HW (half-width) fonts were added for Regular and Bold. They were inserted, not appended.

In other words, font collections have the potential to change the relative ordering of the fonts, which would usually happen when fonts are added. This is in terms of their index values, and this has actually happened in at least one broadly-distributed collection, and there are plans in place for having this happen again.

I was told that the 'name' table plays little or no part in terms of how CSS deals with a font collection, which is unfortunate because that is the table which provides the most reliable (unique) name of a font, such as the name.ID=6 string.

Best...

-- Ken Lunde