Kent Lew

In general, Ray is right. Adding Greek and Cyrillic glyphs to Latin classes adds very little (but not quite nothing) to the {kern} GPOS table.

The bloat only occurs if there is a class-glyph or glyph-class exception pair and the class has to be enumerated. In which case, that exception pair, which appears as one pair from a design standpoint, becomes several pairs from a font compilation standpoint.

If there are no exception pairs involving the multi-script class, then there is no bloat.

Hmm. This is the page I use: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/topic_feature_file_syntax.html

If you are not utilizing the original outlines or data, then the considerations are primarily ethical/moral. John Downer’s classic essay “Call It What It Is” provides some valuable perspective on these considerations, I think.

There may be legal considerations as well, if the original typeface in question fall under E.U. jurisdiction, where design protections may be greater.

On the one hand, markets have always been driven by the principle of “building a better mouse trap.”

On the other hand, we are a community of colleagues as well as competitors.

Personally, I would tread carefully, myself.

Actually, this is not strictly true for features in Adobe syntax which are being compiled by AFDKO. From http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/topic_feature_file_syntax.html#5.d :

“A contiguous set of ligature rules does not need to be ordered in any particular way by the font editor; the implementation software must do the appropriate sorting.”

The compiler is supposed to be responsible for ordering the longest substitutions first.

Ray — Here’s what typical usage looks like:



That language is standardized, as indicated in the Wikipedia article Khaled linked to.

Incidentally, we included this character in Miller Text when it was expanded a few years ago, since Matthew had already drawn it at the special request of someone (possibly Will Powers?). I’ve taken to including it in my own designs now also, given my target market.