I feel that “a published specification” would perhaps be a better way to look at it.
For example I published the specification for the golden ligatures collection.
It is not a standard and I do not seek it to be a standard.
It exists and people may use it if they so wish. Some of it has been used by James Kass within the Code2000 font and I have used various parts of it within some of my own fonts, for example Quest text, Chronicle Text and the 10000 font for which there are threads in the High-Logic Gallery forum.
As the golden ligatures collection is not a standard and is not purported to be a standard, there is no problem when other people use other code point allocations for some of the same ligature glyphs.
You have already made progress which has amazed me. I did not realize that a template could be produced as a pdf as a result of entering information in a form on a web page.
I am thinking that when the Submit button is pushed that the client-side form sends a package of information, in text form, to the server-side processor. Would it be a good idea to add an extra page to the pdf and start with the word ITEMS and then include, in text form, an exact copy of the text, including field names, that the client-side form sent to the processor?
Yes, it IS a good idea. The human needs it - to check that there is all as expected in the pdf and to remember what were the parameters and possibly to copy the information to text editor (or EXcel) and modify it there and go then back to the form and enter modified information.
In template pages there is no room to include meta information in font size that is readable but in title sheet there would be room.
The program needs only the barcode with encoded data.
I got to thinking that if the program were adapted so that OpenType glyph substitution information could be included in the pdf, then the template generator program would be capable of being used to produce OpenType fonts with automatic ligature substitution, discretionary ligatures and alternate glyphs. All of these features might not be used by Scanahand at the present time or even in the medium future timescale, yet the template program would allow the information to be encoded ready to be used if the opportunity arose.
At first I thought that that might be a very lengthy task to achieve, needing lots of discussion by people who know about OpenType.
However, I am wondering whether the infrastructure could be achieved by adding one or two large text area inputs to the form and allowing people to add into those text area inputs whatever text they like and an exact copy of that text would then be included on a page of the pdf. Maybe one text area with the name OpenTypeParameters or maybe several text areas with names based on the names of the various OpenType tables?
The system could be produced such that if there is no text in a text area, then nothing is added to the pdf, so if OpenType information was not being specified for the font then the pdf would not be affected by the availability of one or more of such text areas on the form.
It would need some discussion by people who know about OpenType, but maybe a specification would be straightforwardly achievable.
Do you mean e.g. if the user has included characters f and i in template, the template generator program would add also ligature glyph fi AUTOMATICALLY or only if the user has MANUALLY INSTRUCTED the program to add ligature fi to some unicode code point?
In the automatic method there should be preinstalled ligature tables and in the manual method this information comes manually from user. The table structure could be like this LigatureLeft[0]=“f”, LigatureRight[0]=“i”, UnicodePointOfLigature[0]=45321 or formatted according to Opentype tables.
That’s of course possible. The first page(s) of template pdf could include meta information of the font, both as text and as barcode. In the proper glyph outline pages of template there is no much room for barcodes containing metainformation. It would also be possible to extract the whole metadata to xml-file that could be shared to other people or inputted to font generator program.
Well, I was thinking that the information would be manually added to the text area of the template generating facility. Yet if there were an option to include some preset information then that could well be helpful.
I was thinking of some of the text being like that used in the Adding OpenType features thread, in particular that used by Bhikkhu Pesala in his post which is timestamped Thu May 29, 2008 11:07 am which is currently as I write this text the last post in the thread.
Some ligatures can be of three or more characters.
In addition there would need to be some way of tagging an alternate glyph so that the software knows of which character it is an alternate glyph. For example, the system needs to know that a swash alternate glyph of a lowercase e is another version of an “e”.
Yet I am not suggesting any specific ways of including the information in the pdf. I do not know enough about OpenType tables to do so. I am putting the idea forward in the hope that there will be a discussion and that people who do know about OpenType tables will be able to make a suggestion of the best way to do it.
The automatic or manual substition data could be fine feature and I suppose the implementation is very simple and may be added after examining OpenType tables.
The most critical and I think the most difficult is to enable language specific glyph selection. The technic is simple but where to find the information of which glyphs are essential to which language and are there some recommended glyphs that every font should have.
Is there one source of information or should this data be collected from various sources?
I added there one more way to select glyphs: by USC Collection e.g. Basic Latin, Latin Extended-A, Bengali, Hebrew Extended, Katakana, Geometric Shapes.
Maybe that could be used as the source of the alphabets of European languages. Then there are rest of the World and other glyphs such as number, accents, combining marks, ligatures, currency symbols, punctuation. Many of them are language-specific and should be included into the font.
Any ideas where to find language spesific glyphs other than alphabets? And other than European languages?