Richard Hughes wrote:
Hi,
I'm asking a couple of things -- is TT_NAME_ID_SAMPLE_TEXT specified anywhere? I'd expect it to contain something like "How quickly daft jumping zebras vex" but I wanted to check that was indeed the kind of thing it might show.
Yes, it's in the OpenType specification:
https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/name.htm
which just says:
"Sample text; This can be the font name, or any other text that the designer thinks is the best sample to display the font in."
The seconds is really asking why so few fonts actually use this metadata item :) Would it be possible to add these in at package build time, as showing something like "Sample text" using Lohit-Punjabi.ttf doesn't make sense at all.
I think the Latin-centric view is that any standard English pangram is reasonable, so they don't supply it. Non-Latin scripts would really benefit from some good sample text.
As the font packaging guidelines now require us to make font metadata corrections for licence-related strings, meaning you'll see more font packages using tools like ttname, it isn't a big leap to suggest that we also supply readsonable sample text, and suggest that upstream include it.