Fontbakery: [specifications/dsig] Which applications require a dsig table?

[m4rc1e]

It's 2018 and I'm wondering which MS apps depend on this table?

There's no rationale in the test, just a very loose comment.

https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery/blob/master/Lib/fontbakery/specifications/dsig.py

I'd love for someone to confirm that MS Office 2013 depends on this table etc and then we can add this to the test rationale.

btw, Fontmake doesn't create a dsig table.

cc @khaledhosny

[jenskutilek]

I can confirm that Word 2016 does not require a DSIG table in TTFs for the OT layout features to be recognized.

[anthrotype]

:champagne:

[chrissimpkins]

Is it possible to revisit this FAIL? We are still failing default fontmake builds which means that a project must implement a post-compile workaround to pass fontbakery tests when fonts are compiled with fontmake.

I suggest that we either provide explicit rationale for this failure so that users can understand whether to exclude it themselves or (ideally) downgrade to a WARN in the universal profile and expand the rationale for the test.

Associated: https://github.com/googlefonts/fontmake/issues/431

Information on affected applications from Khaled Hosny: https://github.com/googlefonts/fontmake/issues/431#issuecomment-387685309
Information on MS Word 2016 from Jens Kutilek: https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery/issues/1845#issuecomment-386276026

[bobh0303]

I can confirm that, with Windows 10, Word 2013 _does_ require DSIG in some contexts. For example, Stylistic Sets won't work in latin script fonts without DSIG.

(As mentioned above, this is no longer true for Word 2016)

[chrissimpkins]

Thanks @bobh0303! That is helpful.

[chrissimpkins]

Office 2013 Extended Support end date is 4/11/2023:

Microsoft Fixed Life Cycle Policy

[felipesanches]

yeah, we'll have to keep the check as-is. We should consider sending a PR to fontmake to ensure it generates fonts with dummy signatures.

[chrissimpkins]

Marc raised the issue in https://github.com/googlefonts/fontmake/issues/431 but there was not support for it.

[chrissimpkins]

I added all of this information to the rationale for the check in https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery/pull/2716

[chrissimpkins]

The MS team confirmed the findings by Jens and Bob here through the developer who changed the behavior in MS Word back in 2014. The absence of a DSIG table has not blocked the enumeration of OpenType features in MS Word since.