Happy 20th Birthday, OpenType!

Ray Larabie
Ray Larabie Posts: 1,431
in Miscellaneous News
Press release from May 6, 2006.
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Comments

  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,007
    1996?
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,431
    Derp! Yes.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    {salt}
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,431
    Are there are any open source applications which support liga (standard ligatures). People contact me wanting to use liga with open source apps all I can come up with is LibreOffice. And even with LibreOffice, it's dicey since you can't turn liga off. There's a checkbox but it doesn't toggle the feature.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 740
    What kind of open source applications? Typesetting ones (XeTeX, SILE) do; for DTP, Scribus probably ought to; for word processing, yes, LibreOffice.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,207
    That press release is more marriage announcement (of royalty, with offspring in mind) than birth announcement.

    The gestation was elephantine in duration, InDesign 1.5 being the first major application to support OpenType, in 2001. 
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,431
    edited June 2016
    @Simon Cozens Applications that can generate graphics. I don't think Scribus supports any OT features. Last I checked it didn't.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    @Khaled Hosny has been working on OT support in Scribus (to enable Arabic)
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,883
    Nick Shinn said:
    The gestation was elephantine in duration, InDesign 1.5 being the first major application to support OpenType, in 2001. 

    InDesign 1.5 had the same OT support as 1.0, as I recall. Just liga (standard ligatures) and onum + pnum (proportional oldstyle figures). The big jump was InDesign 2.0, January 2002, which suddenly supported something like a dozen features.
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,431
    Photoshop 6 had OT support back before the Spice Girls split up. Maybe around the same time as InDesign. When I was doing my first OT experiments, I was testing in PS6.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,207
    Right Thomas, and InDesign 2.0 come out in concert with the OT version of Caflisch Script and its massive use of Contextual Alternates. 
  • ivan louette
    ivan louette Posts: 327
    Inkscape supports Liga and many other OT features. But you cannot disable anything. I am very sad that Scribus doesn't support OT and that's the main reason why I don't use it.
  • SiDaniels
    SiDaniels Posts: 277
    I think April 23rd 1997 would be the official birthday, as that's when the spec was published. Looks like OpenType can't legally buy a drink (at least here in the US) until 2018.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    ivan louette said:
    I am very sad that Scribus doesn't support OT and that's the main reason why I don't use it.
    @Khaled Hosny has been working on this, btw

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