Out of interest, why did you pick the hhea values to always be primary? Two main issues that I see: 1) it ignores a foundry’s decision to set the useTypoMetrics flag (or not). There could be a reason why winAscent/Descent is better than usTypo for a given font.
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Introducing that flag, like introducing any other flag late in the game, was an incredibly silly idea. (Entertaining type designers with how to define data that application developers would ignore anyway – including those working for the company that had introduced it.)
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While I think MS Office should follow the OT standard, I understand too well why it doesn’t right now (years of cruft and large corporate policy). But the standards are public. So new applications should be expected to align. Or do you just want to give them a pass?
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That’s a pretty peculiar way to look at it.
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Replying to @KLTF @aaronbell and
IIRC: Apps correctly chose OS/2 Typo values. Except for MS Office apps. MS didn’t like to fix that, there, instead introduced a funny flag – leaving it to type designers to fix MS Office apps’ bug. Or not. MS Office apps, turned out, didn’t bother to respect that flag for years.
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Replying to @KLTF @aaronbell and
Use of Win metrics for linespacing wasn't limited to Office apps: it was near universal on Windows. And so many fonts had subsequently been made with that assumption, that a lot of Typo metrics were unreliable (early 2000s, metrics dara reliability has improved since).
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Replying to @TiroTypeworks @aaronbell and
Any evidence for sTypo metrics being unreliable? (I spent the last hours inspecting old fonts in particular but couldn’t verify this claim. Overall, sTypo metrics seem to express type designers’ intent quite well. hhea metrics reflect either sTypo or usWin.)
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Replying to @KLTF @TiroTypeworks and
I ask because: 1) Aaron correctly pointed out that hhea metrics seem the least reliable ones. 2) OS/2 sType metrics, to me, so far, seem the most reliable ones, reflecting type designers’ intent, so would be the obvious choice.
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Replying to @KLTF @TiroTypeworks and
3) Now, re your follow-up tweet, I do buy that MS hesitated to just switch from OS/2 usWin to sTypo, risking document reflow. Makes perfect sense. 4) What I have trouble to buy is the additional claim or fear that sType is, or was, unreliable.
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Replying to @KLTF @aaronbell and
It was the concern expressed at the time. I don't know how many fonts Microsoft folk were examining, or if there were particular ones of concern.
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If this is useful as a data point, a library Figma uses for reading metrics (FreeType) at some point got updated to understand the useTypoMetrics (although still prefer hhea in its absence) – Figma just didn’t catch up with that update yet.pic.twitter.com/CcTnbwGX0A
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