Whatever happened to Adobe's SING proposal?

wiresandbooks
wiresandbooks Posts: 3
in Font Technology
I remember reading that, back in 2005, Adobe proposed dealing with gaiji and other glyph variants (or unencoded glyphs) by developing a sort of mini-OpenType font format that would contain only one or two glyphs.

Unfortunately, the only sign I can find that anyone actually implemented this is a buffer overflow vulnerability while parsing SING tables in a PDF reader.

Was it ahead of its time? Too complicated for regular use? Or just an ill-fitting solution for the problem?
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  • Christopher Slye
    Christopher Slye Posts: 164
    I haven’t thought about SING in years. I think support shipped in InDesign and Illustrator for a while? It was probably underutilized (maybe underappreciated) and ultimately deprecated.

    Ken also wrote a white paper about it. 
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,954
    Adobe InDesign supported it, for a time—support was killed in InDesign CS5. I do not recall with certainty, but I don’t think it got support from Illustrator and Photoshop. It also never got support in font editors; they would have been a logical environment for generating SING glyphlets.

    It was a very clever idea, but the cost of implementing something like that is noticeable, and it never got enough traction. It wasn’t even close, in the end.

    I think the perceived value just wasn’t high enough to convince some critical early adopters it was worth the effort to be among the first. It never really got off the ground properly.

    Perhaps if Jim DeLaHunt had been able to gather external partners outside Adobe to also back it, that would have helped. If Apple or Microsoft was in the mix, it might have had some chance. But I can think of other font innovations that also didn’t make it, which had more backing than SING.

    That said, it is not impossible that SING or something like it could come back again in the future. It would be great to be able to ship, say, the new Saudi rial currency symbol for a bunch of Arabic fonts, without needing to update all those fonts. One can see plenty of use cases, actually. It is just whether it is worth adopting a whole new tech for them... I don’t see it as likely. Too many pieces to update.
  • wiresandbooks
    wiresandbooks Posts: 3
    Disappointing, but makes sense. I'd wager more people would have used it in Word (had the support been there) than in InDesign.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,954
    I found this, a pretty good article about the SING tech from 2004: https://atadistance.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/tsr-0818_p4-7.pdf
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 763
    When I was looking for information on SING for the fonttools documentation, I found this: https://web.archive.org/web/20080627183635/http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/gdk/topic.html
  • wiresandbooks
    wiresandbooks Posts: 3
    Oh yeah, finding articles is not difficult. Finding implementations turned out to be much more difficult.

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