Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Youtube — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:09:30 GMT

"This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." Use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apDGPl2SfpA instead

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Michael S. Kaplan — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:25:46 GMT

No worries, Josh -- I looked and found the thread Si was referring to -- no one mentioned the actual problem or mentioned it found its way into a bug. So I might have written the very same blog only from a different source had I seen all that, in any case -- only slightly sooner! :-)

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Josh — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:11:30 GMT

Michael, you're welcome...I didn't realize this was already documented/known/being addressed, either. Fortunately it was obvious upon opening & viewing the font; didn't spend much time on it.

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Jan Kučera — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:41:52 GMT

Hmmm why did the pretty useless PS managed to get in, but my preceding question did not? Any forbidden word or characters? :)

And it indeed is very tiny bug too! ...seems the PS was not _that_ useless :-) ...if you zoom out enought, it switches back to ⅳ. I would say just not usually sized bug. ;-)

But I keep asking myself how on earth was this bug discovered...

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Michael S. Kaplan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:59:49 GMT

Hey Si -- I didn't see the thread (I'm a bit behind on those mails!). Someone asked me about it and I just ran with it. :-)

Hey Josh -- thanks fir the investigation -- very cool little bug, that! Or actually, it is not a "little" bug since it looks right at little sizes!

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Jan Kučera — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:41:10 GMT

PS. Funny how when you type this into Word 2007 and drag the zoom slider, it keeps switching between ⅲ and ⅳ :-)

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Si — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:08:00 GMT

Win 7 #425025 - but you knew that right? It came through various aliases including Multilingual Issues Discussion on Dec 9th.

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Josh — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:48:30 GMT

OK, found the problem.

A little background/info:

0) There's no format 14/4 issue

1) SimSun uses embedded bitmaps for 6 sizes

2) The U+2172 code maps to glyph 959

3) The *bitmap shapes* stored for glyph 959 have the "iii" shape

4) The *outline* for glyph 959 is a "iv".

When you see the "iii" in Character Mapper grid, it's because it's using one of the sizes where it has an embedded bitmap...so it appears to be correct there. But when the glyph is displayed at a size without an embedded bitmap, you'll see the outline shape, which is wrong.

This is pretty clearly a font bug.

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Josh — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:25:03 GMT

Wow...positively bizarre. If I get a chance I'll take a look; maybe some mismatch between the character-to-glyph mapping of the format 14 versus the format 4 cmap subtables? I think SimSun now uses both (?). The format 4 (BMP only) is supposed to be a pure subset of the format 14 (which maps >BMP) but they could easily get out of sync.

re: Counting to four with the Holy Hand Grenade of Typography

Andrew West — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:57:36 GMT

I think that you're right that it is something to do with TTC files. I remember having a similar problem in my own code a couple of years back, when I was getting Cambria instead of Cambria Math (or something like that). I can't recall the exact details of the problem, but it was related to the fact that Cambria and Cambria Math are packaged as a TTC file, but Cambria Bold/Italic/BoldItalic are separate font files, and as TTC fonts are enumerated before or after individual ttf fonts, Cambria Regular is not enumerated together with its Bold/Italic siblings.