I have a bunch of stupid questions about OpenType tables. Let's kick off with one about localisation in the
"Unicode" isn't an encoding, but "requires two bytes per character" suggests to me this is in UTF16 when platformID=3. Could or should that be made more explicit?
But the one about the Macintosh completely confuses me. Let's say I have a Japanese string. The spec suggests I could have a string which is for the Mac platform (platformID=1) and then I choose the appropriate language ID for the platform (languageID=11). Now I have to choose the encoding ID, which on this platform is a "script manager code." Looking in the table, there's a script manager code for Japanese which means I set encodingID=1. Now I need to encode the string itself in a "single byte string" encoding of Japanese, which as far as I'm aware doesn't exist.
What's going on here? Why do the Macintosh script manager codes even exist? Perennial question: does anything actually use them in practice, or should all non-Latin stuff be restricted to platformID=3 entries?
name table: What character encoding should be used for non-Latin entries? The specification says:Note that OS/2 and Windows both require that all name strings be defined in Unicode. Thus all 'name' table strings for platform ID = 3 (Windows) will require two bytes per character. Macintosh fonts require single byte strings.
"Unicode" isn't an encoding, but "requires two bytes per character" suggests to me this is in UTF16 when platformID=3. Could or should that be made more explicit?
But the one about the Macintosh completely confuses me. Let's say I have a Japanese string. The spec suggests I could have a string which is for the Mac platform (platformID=1) and then I choose the appropriate language ID for the platform (languageID=11). Now I have to choose the encoding ID, which on this platform is a "script manager code." Looking in the table, there's a script manager code for Japanese which means I set encodingID=1. Now I need to encode the string itself in a "single byte string" encoding of Japanese, which as far as I'm aware doesn't exist.
What's going on here? Why do the Macintosh script manager codes even exist? Perennial question: does anything actually use them in practice, or should all non-Latin stuff be restricted to platformID=3 entries?