Technically, the name table entries are just raw strings of characters in a specified encoding, so any character that’s considered valid in any given encoding should be allowed to be used. This, of course, doesn’t apply for critical entries like family name and the like, which have to meet certain assumptions for the font to work properly in various environments, but for a free form entries like license text I think it’s entirely up to a font producer.
Unless you’re a font authoring app developer and you want to enforce on your users whatever you think is the most reasonable thing to do…
I just started running fontbakery with various profiles (-check-universal, for example) and it issues a FAIL for any name table entry with line breaks. (code com.google.fonts/check/name/line_breaks). The complaints are the same for Unicode, Macintosh, or Windows platforms.
I can't track down the source of / rationale for this restriction. Might anyone know??
I've tried various profiles, including check-adobefonts, and they all complain at line-breaks in any name table field.
I've seen the Google Fonts rationale for things like not using Reserved Font Names, but cannot track down the rationale for the no line-break restriction.
I've seen the ugliness of OFL text embedded without newlines, and I shudder at the prospect ...
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But that leaves the question with the other control chars. Are there other chars then tabs and line breaks that someone would use?
Unless you’re a font authoring app developer and you want to enforce on your users whatever you think is the most reasonable thing to do…
I can't track down the source of / rationale for this restriction. Might anyone know??
I've seen the Google Fonts rationale for things like not using Reserved Font Names, but cannot track down the rationale for the no line-break restriction.
I've seen the ugliness of OFL text embedded without newlines, and I shudder at the prospect ...
https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery/issues/2778 and
https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery/issues/2779