Re: Italic open-o in omega

William Adams wrote:

[snip]

> That's limiting though---a good counter-example of what's possible if
> the typesetting engine is aware of glyph shapes is Adobe InDesign's
> optical kerning / margin adjustment which is made possible by the
> system being able to make adjustments based on glyph shapes.

Yes, but it is surely debatable whether that (or similar adjustments)
need access to the glyph itself or only to an extended font metric which
describes the outline of the glyph but not its *inline (by which I mean
a font metric which describes only the exterior of a glyph and which
says nothing about its interior.  Knuth's font metrics are very simplistic,
treating each glyph as a rectangle (plus italic correction and lig/kern
information).  One could surely envisage a considerably more powerful
metric which could describe each glyphs outline (its "shape"), yet
which is still much simpler than a description of the glyph itself.

Philip Taylor