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#4 add anchors to pfaedit table in TTF
Anchors are a key part of a glyph design and currently
the only way to get at their locations is either by
unmangling the generated OT code, at which point the
anchor name is lost, or by parsing sdf. It would be
very helpful for those doing TTF based font development
and wanting access to the anchor information (name ->
position) to be able to get at it. The pfaedit table
within a TTF font seems the natural place to put this
information, along with the comments, if required.
My particular need is in creating Graphite based
complex script fonts where I have processes that use
anchors. Adding this one feature to FontForge will
allow the creation of a completely opensource font
creation process for Graphite as well as OpenType.
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Are you saying you essentially want to duplicate the GPOS
'mark' lookups and put them in the PfEd table... also adding
the anchor class name?
This sounds like a step backwards to me. GPOS is a standard.
If I duplicate it, it won't be standard -- why will it be
any easier to use?
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the advantage of also holding the anchor information in the
pfaedit table will be that it will also hold the names of
the anchors which are lost when the GPOS tables are created.
I suppose if there were a clear way to associate GDEF
anchors with names that would also be sufficient.
The key activity here is extracting the anchors and using
them by name in things like Graphite or VOLT or whatever.
Of course there are easier ways of handling the whole
anchors mechanism within fontforge given that a base glyph
can only have base anchors. For example, the type of base
anchor something is, is entirely dependent on the type of
glyph the anchor is on. In fact, really there are 4 types of
anchor: base, mk, entry, exit, everything else I would
suggest is derivable. But I may be making a slight over
statement there :)
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No I am saying all I want is a list of anchor points and
their positions for each glyph. If you want to add some way
to link that information with what is in the GPOS table
(which is a whole lot more, and is also much harder to find
out where each anchor is) then that's fine. I don't want you
to replace generating the GPOS table, but for Graphite it
helps a lot to have access to properly named anchors.
So all I am after is a list of anchors: the name and
position for each one, for each glyph.
If there is an alternative way of extracting this
information from a generated ttf or OT font, then I'm open
to using that, but the OT tables don't store anchor names
(which is why when I open our complex OT fonts in fontforge
all the anchors start repeating and get random names)