Re: Announcing new font compression project

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 3:01 PM, Jonathan Kew <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think there would be merit in separating - both for discussion and in
> implementation - the two logical stages that are being done here.
>
> First, there's an "OpenType normalization and optimization" step, which
> would (for example) replace repeated flag bytes with the repeat code, use
> the optimal format for various subtables where there are several possible
> formats with different packing characteristics, etc. The result of this
> process is a valid OpenType font that is rendering-identical to the
> original, and could be used by any OpenType-supporting system as is; it
> would be a reasonable post-processing operation for any OpenType font
> production system, if that system does not itself generate optimized files.
>
> Then, secondly and separately, there's the actual compression and
> repackaging, which takes the optimized OpenType file and turns it into a
> WOFF2 (or whatever) file, from which a bitwise-identical optimized OpenType
> file can be recovered by the decompression process.

Absolutely.

Among other things, in some scenarios that initial optimization could
be done leisurely upstream, even though the compression/repackaging
needs to be done in real time.

T