Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Apple typography

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[edit] Apple typography

I stumbled across this article while browsing pages about fonts, and was instantly taken with how well it presents the history of an influential typographical design of the past few decades. I was moreover pleased to find that the article has a number of cited sources and credited images. This seems to me to be featured article material. --FOo 03:17, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

  • comment needs a longer lead, though I agree -- it's a great article! Tuf-Kat 05:41, September 2, 2005 (UTC)
  • Object. A very informative article, but it is not well-formatted, and has a poor structure. As mentionned above, the lead section should be longer, and there are too many micro-headers. I'll see what I can do about that myself, but until then, I object this becoming an FA: Phils 11:07, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Object Besides the above points, info on support for OpenType fonts can be put in a para rather than scattering it all over. Points that can be added:

What are the differences between support for opentype that exists in Tiger and in Windows XP? What type of fonts are being used for displaying asian & Complex text languages now? Are there moves to switch to opentype fonts for these? You can find some pointers at the kannada wikipedia (in english). Otherwise, a very good article. pamri 18:04, September 2, 2005 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that this article doesn't seem to be intending to deal with font support in OS X so much as Apple's use and styles of typography. The first is a software technical issue; the second is an artistic and industrial design issue. --FOo 18:42, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
Fair enough, but can the title or lead be reworked to make this clear? My questions on asian language support/OpenType fonts(OTF) were not that far off since my doubts are based on the section on Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) and a bit of googling has cleared some of my doubts. The question is a technical one but answers an artistic design issue, because the choice of fonttype for asian languages (especially indic) play a role in the quality of its rendering (See http://sharma-home.net/people/arun/languages/kannada/ for an example) and it hardly takes a line or two to answer. The section on AAT didn't make it clear what made it different from OTF's and whether it supported features like GPOS/GSUB that OTF provides for Indian languages and if not, how are Gujarathi and Hindi being displayed now. I have taken the liberty to rename the line 'Features exclusive to AAT currently include:', since most of them are available in OTF. See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/featurelist.htm This fontforge document answered my 2nd doubt. I will try to see, if I can add these myself. pamri 07:04, September 3, 2005 (UTC)
OpenType does not provide very good support for Indic languages when compared against that provided by AAT. All of the slack is taken up by Uniscribe, and this means it cannot be changed by font developers. This is the SIL's primary reason for developing their own Windows/Linux technology called Graphite (Macs are hard to come by in the far-flung areas where the SIL do their work), and is one of the areas where AAT differs substantially from OpenType. I wrote the section on AAT in the Apple typography article, and also the section at the Kannada wikipedia cited above. If anything is not clear to you please let me know and I will do my best to improve upon it. Nicholas 23:04, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation, Nick. It would be good if you can add a bit about Indic support to the AAT section. PamriTalk 04:12, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Support Tlogmer 00:04, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Object. No lead. Mark1 02:27, 7 September 2005 (UTC)