Talk:Apple Advanced Typography

Features: OpenType comparison askew
I was examining the sentence beginning the last paragraph of the Features section: "While OpenType offers all of the above to some extent, it is an all or nothing affair in most cases, or granularity of control is otherwise restricted by comparison." I ended up deleting the whole thing. Although AAT has several advantages over OpenType, in this particular area the opposite of what is stated is true: OpenType functionality has a history of being more modular than AAT, and it is very easy to control what granularity is desired. I suppose one could have simply left the statement "OpenType offers all of the above," but that just sounds like tooting the OpenType horn to no clear purpose, given that there is no overall thread of comparison within the article to give context to the statement. Thomas Phinney | Talk 21:20, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Removed copy-edit tag
There is nothing particularly wrong with this article in terms of grammar, it just contains so much tecnical information that it is hard to understand. So I have removed the copy-edit tag. JenLouise 01:56, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

Features: OpenType Indic comparison still askew
I will confess that I don't really understand the thrust of the section on Indic, because it doesn't really discuss how Indic is handled in AAT. The last paragraph, in particular (assuming I understand it correctly) is either irrelevant or wrong. AAT does have classes, for one thing, but buried within the bowels of the 'morx' table. I'm not aware of any Indic script which can't be handled perfectly well with AAT (and I'm sure that Xenotype could back me up on this), but inasmuch as this section is really about how Indic is done in OT and not AAT, there is the vague impression left that AAT can't really be used for Indic. (Granted, I'm prejudiced.) I think this section needs a general rewrite and, in the spirit of Wikipedia, I suppose that volunteers me to be the one to undertake it. TsengTH (talk) 03:57, 28 October 2008 (UTC)


 * MacOS doesn't support the specific OpenType features used by OpenType fonts on Windows. See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/SpecificationsOverview.mspx for details.  Apple's included Indic fonts, and their general Indic support is pathetic and buggy.  Microsoft is years ahead here.  135.196.27.80 (talk) 20:39, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The sentiment you express here is a confusion that has crept into the article. This article is about AAT fonts specifically (not about OpenType fonts). And AAT fully supports the typographic needs of Indic, Arabic and all of the other Unicode scripts (and even ad hoc non-Unicode scripts). So this is not an appropriate topic for this article. It would be better to add a section on the support for OpenType features to the OpenType article. There it would be appropriate to discuss specific implementations/consumers of OpenType fonts like Apple's CoreText, the Cocoa text system, and ATSUI (just to cover some of those implementations/consumers from the Mac OS side of things). On the other hand, if you look at Apple's AAT Indic fonts I don't think you will find any problems with Indic script support. Indexheavy (talk) 21:06, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Major rewrite
I made a number of extensive changes, mostly to the sections on AAT layout and AAT support for Indic. I also added two links at the bottom (hopefully relevant ones) and will be adding documentation soon (I hope).

Basically, the section on "Processing of AAT rules" did not discuss in any depth how AAT actually goes about processing. Rather, it started by providing information on how Mac OS X determines whether OpenType or AAT layout is to be used (and that incorrectly), then provides a summary of AAT features. I separated the discussion of OpenType/AAT support on Mac OS X into its own section and expanded the discussion of how AAT processes text for layout. I may have been too prolix there. Time will tell.

I found the section on Indic text largely unsalvageable. The difficulty here is that the discussion seemed to be about how OpenType handles Indic and why OpenType Indic fonts don't work on Mac OS X. I felt that an article on AAT should be more about how AAT supports Indic and the extent to which Indic support is, in fact, available on Mac OS X.  (And, alas, that means we lost the nice illustration.)  I don't want to gloss over the problems for Indic font developers; I think I may say without boasting that I know better than almost anybody just how much a pain it is to write AAT tables for Indic. I hope I've left it clear that a typical third-party Indic font which works on Windows won't work on Mac OS X. I did, however, want to also make it clear that Indic layout is, in fact, perfectly possible, and that fonts for most Indic scripts are available, albeit far too few.TsengTH (talk) 05:15, 28 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for doing that rewrite. That section has frustrated me for some time, since I knew that what it implied could not be quite right, but I didn't know enough about this area to put my finger on what was wrong with it. It did recently occur to me that the section was talking about OpenType and that it was in an article about AAT, but I still didn't know the situation with AAT. Again, thanks for improving the article. I think the stuff you removed (including the nice image) might best be moved to the OpenType article (or one of its related articles). Indexheavy (talk) 15:33, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

OpenType / AAT question
I've been doing some work on the article Mapping of Unicode characters, filling in the various special-purpose characters that are integral to the modern Unicode text processing model. In doing so I created a section on the "FRACTION SLASH" character (U+2044) and was researching how rendering is supposed to be handled and how it is actually handled. I found that most fonts—even those that do a fairly decent job with single digit numerators and denominators—do not render according to Unicode expectations. Apple Chancery was the one font I found that was an exception, which nicely renders the string literal “4 221⁄225” in plain text as:



So since I found so few fonts capable of rendering this correctly I was wondering if this is a limitation of the OpentType font format when compared to the AAT font format? Or, alternatively, is this due to Mac OS X's limited support for OpenType font features where the same font on Windows would work correctly? I thought this would be the place to ask, though I might try the OpenType talk page if I don't get a response here. Thanks in advance for any thoughts. Indexheavy (talk) 17:26, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

External links modified
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Digital typography
There is a discussion at Talk:Typography that may interest editors. The present redirect target of Digital typography is being debated. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:53, 24 March 2021 (UTC)