[Mattmaier1975]

I've been noticing all the new trending cool fonts are going by .OTF.  Will Kodi eventually support .OTF fonts?

[Klojum]

Will Kodi eventually support .OTF fonts?

I'm not sure if "being cool" is the most important reason to incorporate OTF fonts into Kodi. The only reason I can think of, is OTF's supposed capability of allowing the storage of up to 65,000 characters. That would sound like a 1-for-all font. Something that perhaps could benefit with certain foreign character sets. AFAIK, the current Arial TTF font takes care of that already for the better part. For the non-supported languages, Kodi users can install a different TTF font that supports their language characters.

Also, a font file that can carry upto 65K characters must also be dealt with on low-powered devices (e.g. Raspberry Pi 2, 3, 4). If supporting OTF becomes a problem for them, memory-wise and/or cpu/gpu-wise, then I don't see any future for OTF support in Kodi.

[scott967]

I don't believe there is anything in an otf extension font that Kodi can use that isn't available in a ttf extension font with otf features.  But it could be that the font designer has packaged the font in otf extension.  On Windows, it will indicate a font is "otf" (even when extension is ttf) if a certain table is present, even though that table has no use (so it is possible simply to add that in a font editor to get Windows to show the font as "otf").

The main features in otf that Kodi might use in the future (a PR is presently in work for Kodi 20) are the GSUB and GPOS tables.  A typical use is to create ligatures  f i => fi but they are more important for some script families such as Indic and Arabic.

AFAIK, other font features such as hinting and kerning are already supported in Kodi.

I don't have an interest (so don't have much knowledge) but there may be some features in otf that are important for displaying colored emoji.  I don't know if there is any dev interest in this sort of thing.  I guess they might have some use in music (if they are used in official titles).

scott s.
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[Mattmaier1975]

Thanks for the feedback!  If I like a font i'll see if it can be converted to a ttf.

[scott967]

Thanks for the feedback!  If I like a font i'll see if it can be converted to a ttf.

Keep in mind that fonts with .otf extension typically have their glyphs defined using postscript (also known as CFF) while .ttf extension will use true-type.  The impact is that postscript uses cubic bezier splines while true type uses quadratic.  So if you convert the font (using eg free fontforge) you can't guarantee that the converted glyphs will be identical.

Again, Kodi Matrix does not support the advanced open type features that require a "shaping engine",  that is in work for the future.  Also, I don't think Kodi will ever support variable fonts (arbitrary change of weight or width) as there probably isn't a viable use case for it, at least for the UI.

scott s.
.

[Mattmaier1975]

Thanks for the feedback!  If I like a font i'll see if it can be converted to a ttf.

Keep in mind that fonts with .otf extension typically have their glyphs defined using postscript (also known as CFF) while .ttf extension will use true-type.  The impact is that postscript uses cubic bezier splines while true type uses quadratic.  So if you convert the font (using eg free fontforge) you can't guarantee that the converted glyphs will be identical.

Again, Kodi Matrix does not support the advanced open type features that require a "shaping engine",  that is in work for the future.  Also, I don't think Kodi will ever support variable fonts (arbitrary change of weight or width) as there probably isn't a viable use case for it, at least for the UI.

scott s.
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Thanks!