437355 - AAT fonts with 'fvar' axis & MM fonts unused

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1302685

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Greg K.]

This is a copy of WebKit bug 5168. On Mac we should take advantage of font variability axes which provide for continuously variable weight, optical size or glyph width. Skia is an example of such a font.

Safari should take advantage of any variable axes available within a font
rather then synthesising traits.
Common axes supported by Multiple Master and AAT fonts include:
* Weight (bold or light)
* Optical Size ('chunkyness' of serifs & thick/thin stroke ratio)
* Glyph width (condensed/extended forms)

Nicholas Shanks included an excellent testcase on the aforementioned WebKit bug showing a table of Qs using the font Skia. It 
has an accompanying image showing the correct rendering.

Comment 1

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

Greg, as an ex-QDGX engineer I would absolutely *love* to enable just the feature you describe.  But all the signs from Apple are that this will not be supported in future Apple text API's like CoreText and there are very few fonts that support width/weight variations like this.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Actually, the CoreText API does include support for variation fonts, although there are very few of them out there. I haven't tested to see whether this also works with MM's, though I expect it probably will, by analogy with how ATSUI handles them.

It probably wouldn't be all that hard to do this (both for CoreText and ATSUI, though I'd be inclined to ignore ATSUI as we intend to abandon that path anyway once we give up support for 10.4).

Comment 3

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

Assigning to Jonathan.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Variation font support was bug 1302685 and dependencies; closing this.