ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 **N738**

Title:

Report of the meeting, Paris, France, August▒September 1988

Source:

James D. Mason, WG8 Convenor

Project:

All WG8 projects

Project editor:

All editors

Status of document:

Draft report

Requested action:

For information

Summary of major points:

Summary report of the WG8 meeting, summary report of the liaison meeting
with SC2 and SC24, report of discussions at WG8 meeting.

Note: Portions of this report were previously issued as part of the
writer\'s official report to the U.S. Department of Energy

Date

December 20, 1988

Distribution:

WG8 and liaisons

Summary Report of the Fall Meeting of WG8

The attendance at the fall meeting of WG8 was again large: 40 people
attended at least part of the meeting, and 35 were present for the
entire week. The largest attendance was at the DSSSL session, with
nearly 20 present at times. This meeting had experts representing ten
national bodies (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Federal Republic of
Germany, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United
States), five external liaison bodies (SGML Users\' Group, Association
for Font Information Interchange, CERN, ECMA TC29/TGPF, and the Arab
Standards and Metrology Organization), another JTC1 subcommittee (SC24)
and two other SC18 working groups (WG3, WG5).

This meeting of WG8 was unusual in that the convenor held the group in
plenary session most of the week. At the previous meeting in April, it
had become obvious that the major projects of WG8 could not progress in
continued isolation; several interproject meetings during that week
showed that it would be appropriate to devote enough time during the
fall meeting to come to some common understandings among the projects.
The need to revise and restructure DIS 9541 also added to the need for a
reexamination of interrelationships and dependencies.

Because both SPDL and Fonts had held special meetings the previous week
and DSSSL and Fonts were planning special meetings not long after the
WG8 meeting, holding this extended plenary will not greatly slow down
the projects. Almost a day and a half during the week were devoted to
individual project sessions; because of the availability of some liaison
experts, some special sessions were also broken out of the otherwise
general plenary.

Plenary Sessions

The normal opening plenary was held on Monday, 29 August, with reports
from national bodies, liaison organizations, and project editors. The
previous week\'s meeting in London was a major topic of discussion.

The extended plenary began with a discussion of areas in which an
interproject interface was necessary. A list of some dozens of topics
was developed, and the topics were sorted into several categories.

Because the interfaces between DSSSL and SPDL often involve fonts, the
discussion was redirected to examine the proposed restructuring of DIS
9541. This topic became the basis of the second day\'s discussion. The
editors of DIS 9541 presented an outline of how the seven-part standard
originally proposed could be arranged after the registration procedures
were moved to the new DIS 10036. The remainder of the first six parts,
which is the bulk of the material, will be condensed into two parts,
dealing with an architecture that identifies attributes of glyphs and
glyph collections and with the interchange format for font resources.
The old seventh part, which treats the interchange format for glyph
shapes, will be either a third part of the reorganized standard or a new
standard.

The remainder of the discussion about the Font standard turned to how it
can be made most useful to other SC18 standards and the technical
details of their interfaces to it.

When the discussion returned to the larger topic of general interfaces
among WG8\'s projects, many issues appeared to have been resolved during
the discussions of DIS 9541. Although not all the interface problems had
been solved, the group felt that the issues were sufficiently well
understood that WG8 could record the current status of agreement and
continue the discussion at the January meeting.

Project Meetings

The group held a special session outside the plenary to discuss some
particular problems in oriental and Arabic typesetting; reports from
this session were brought into the closing plenary and also into the
individual project meetings.

There were major sessions for DSSSL, SPDL, and Fonts; smaller sessions
dealt with SGML Amendments and the technical reports on Techniques for
Using SGML and Guidelines for SGML Syntax-Directed Editing Systems.

SGML Amendments

The first amendment to SGML has been published by ISO. Discussion of the
second amendment was largely deferred to the January meeting to allow
more time for DSSSL.

Techniques for Using SGML

The editor review final comments and prepared a disposition of comments
document; the text will now go for final publication.

Text-Entry Systems

The project on SGML Context-sensitive Editors will apparently be delayed
by only about one meeting period by the appointment of the new editor,
Mr. Mike Cowlishaw. A new text will be issued next month for ballot in
SC18.

DSSSL

The DSSSL group prepared a revised model of information flow through the
composition process that DSSSL will specify and also held a discussion
of the implications of using the SGML LINK process as an enabling
mechanism. A new formal working draft should be issued after the October
special meeting.

SPDL

The SPDL group believes that it can remain on schedule and produce a new
text for Draft Proposal ballot after the January meeting.

Fonts

Since much of the plenary had been devoted to discussing DIS 9541, the
fonts group spent their time consolidating the new approach to their
standard. They expect to produce a new text at the January meeting and
to go out for a second DIS ballot after the April meeting.

Results of the Meeting

The primary results of the WG8 meeting were a better understanding of
the interrelationships among the projects. In particular, the new
direction for DIS 9541 and the pivotal role it plays in the development
of other WG8 standards is better defined.

Conclusion

The goals of the August/September meeting of WG8 were set by the April
meeting. The major projects are now sufficiently advanced that they can
come to general agreement and proceed with well-defined interfaces.
Devoting the greater part of a meeting to a plenary session does not
seem to have decreased their momentum and may, indeed, speed the overall
development of WG8\'s standards.

**Group Dates Location Host**

WG8 89-01-23▒27 Tokyo Japan (SC18/WG8)

WG8 89-04-17▒21 Munich Wang

WG8 89-08-18▒22 Boulder, CO IBM

Supplementary Report on the JTC1 Special Working Group on DIS 9541

Issues Raised Before the Meeting

The Special Working Group of JTC1 was chaired by Mr. Gary Robinson,
Vice-Chairman, Systems, of JTC1. The meeting, at the British Standards
Institution in London, was attended by four representatives of SC2, one
of SC24, and four of SC18/WG8.

The present understanding of the content of the Fonts standard has
evolved slowly, partially as a result of the difficulty in establishing
communication between computer scientists and typographic artists. The
standard was allowed to advance to DIS because it took that long to get
the issues out where they could be identified. Then many computer
specialists, particularly those in SC2, began to take issue with some of
the less clearly defined concepts in DIS 9541. Standards professionals
raised additional questions about the structure of the standard. At the
same time, JTC1 was receiving an increasing number of requests for
registration schemes and decided that it needed to establish a uniform
policy on registration standards and registration authorities. Many of
these forces coalesced in a meeting of the JTC1 Advisory Group in the
spring of 1988, with the result that the special meeting was called to
consider how to bring DIS 9541 into closer alignment with JTC1
procedures.

One of SC2\'s longest-standing difficulties with DIS 9541 has been over
the nature of a ¬character║. It has been easy for coding specialists,
particularly those accustomed to working with Latin-alphabet languages,
to act as though there were an intrinsic link between the code point
associated with a character ¬A║ and the shape displayed on a computer
terminal or printed by a simple printer. In the world of typography,
however, there is no such simple relationship. A font such as ITC Avant
Garde Gothic may have several glyph images associated with the character
¬A║, all of which must be identified and distinguished. So long as DIS
9541 was written in terms of ¬characters║ and not in terms of ¬glyphs,║
the different meanings associated with the term character were a source
of misunderstanding. And the misunderstanding was compounded by an
incorrect assumption that registration numbers for glyphs might be used
in conflict with established code points for characters.

An additional issue raised by SC24 is the need to include among
techniques for representing glyph shapes something that is compatible
with existing computer-graphics standards. At one time the developers of
DIS 9541 had been inclined to provide only one shape representationðto
be an application of a page-description languageðand that approach would
have required implementors of graphics standards to implement a second
language.

Actions taken to revise DIS 9541

Before the London meeting, but after the JTC1 call for the meeting,
another JTC1 Special Working Group on Registration Procedures had been
held in Geneva, with Mr. Dara Hekimi as chairman (Mr. Hekimi was one of
SC2\'s representatives to the London meeting). This meeting had already
suggested revisions to DIS 9541, so that the sections on registration of
glyphs had already been extracted into a new document, DIS 10036. The
general editor for the Fonts project, Mr. Edwin Smura had prepared a
proposed new text of Part 1 of DIS 9541 to reflect this change; he
brought both new documents into the meeting. It was generally agreed
that the new direction proposed for the two standards was appropriate.

Furthermore, at the April meeting of WG8, the team that is developing
DIS 9541 had already concluded that a major source of their difficulty
was the misunderstanding of the term character and had decided to
replace it with glyph. This refinement was readily accepted by SC2, as
they are concerned only with code points in data interchange and not
with representations that are perceived by a user. It was agreed that,
on the one hand, information contentðfor example, in a revisable text
fileðwould most likely be represented by character codes. On the other
hand, imaging informationðsuch as in a printer drive fileðwould contain
glyph identifiers.

Much of the remainder of the meeting was then devoted to a close
examination of the actual writing style of DIS 9541. Mr. Hekimi and
other participants who had long experience in writing standards were
able to point out inconsistencies and redundancies in the text. The
vocabulary section of the standard was trimmed of tutorial material, and
much general informative and background material was moved to a new
annex and out of the body of the standard.

The meeting concluded with greatly improved understanding among the
participating committees and a much clearer division of
responsibilities.

Summary of Discussions

Monday: Opening Plenary

Liaison Reports

SC24 Steve Strasen

Strasen had attended the SC24 Plenary in July, as well as the liaison
meeting in London the week before the WG8 meeting. CGM is being expanded
to 3D models as well as advanced 2D. They are continuing to observe
SC18\'s use of CGM and want to keep abreast of the interworkings of CGM
and SPDL.

SGML UG Joan Smith

Smith had attended the SWG on Registration Authorities. ANSI has been
chosen to be the issuer of identifiers, and the SGML UG has withdrawn
its request to become a RA and has asked that the publication of ISO
9070 not be delayed further.

AFII Ed Smura

AFII also attended the SWG on RAs. AFII will also work through ANSI, at
least for the next five years. As a result of the meeting on RAs, the
registration part of DIS 9541 has been pulled out into a separate
standard, DIS 10036. Although the identifiers to be issued by ANSI will
be numeric, AFII hopes that there will be some way of associating
literal strings with the numbers.

AFII has had a series of meetings during the summer with representatives
from Japan, Korea, the Peoples Republic of China, and Taiwan on the
subject of a common cache of glyphs. AFII sees some problems with
processing models for text and has talked to SC22 on issues related to
multibyte encodings. AFII also plans to continue meeting outside of WG8
to accelerate progress towards common understandings.

ECMA TG29 TGPF Steve Strasen

TGPF continues to work in parallel with WG8 and has sent comments on
SPDL and the ODA-PDL translation studies to WG8. ECMA may not publish
the clear-text encoding of SPDL. TC32 TG5 is working on an aggressive
schedule on the Print Services project.

ASMO Mohammed Elsaleh

ASMO would like to hold a meeting early in 1989 to discuss issues
related to fonts requirements, bilingual text processing and mechanisms
for changing the shape of a glyph according to its context.

National Activity Reports

The U.S. had no formal report. Matt Foley noted that the U.S. had
several formal comment papers to enter into the meeting.

The U.K. report was delivered by Joan Smith. The U.K. had held two
meetings since the last WG8 meeting. They had comments on SGML
Amendment2 and the Techniques report. The U.K. is interested in
extensions to the SGML language. They are presenting a new text for the
Context-Sensitive Editor report. BSI will propose work towards NWIs on
interchange on flexible disks and conformance testing. John Trevitt and
Francis Cave are no longer active, so BSI will propose new editors to
maintain those projects. BSI will also have a new chairman for their WG8
activities.

Dr. Komachi reported that the Japanese group had met four times and
reiterated that they had worked with AFII and had met with Korea on the
common set of glyphs.

Sam Wilmot reported that Canada had held one meeting and had generated
comments on Techniques and the SGML Amendments.

Carsten Borman reported that the DIN group had not met since SC18. He
has been active in WG3 activities, particularly ODA extensions, and the
Bormans have submitted some of the papers from WG3, particularly on
tables and formulæ, to WG8.

Han Nonnekes reported that an SGML Users\' Group has been formed in The
Netherlands and that they may be more active in WG8.

Project Reports

SGML Charles Goldfarb

Amendment 1 was published in July. SDIF has passed the ISO Council and
is ready to be published. Goldfarb will take over as editor of
Registration.

Amendment 2 is out for ballots. The comments on the amendment are more
than just editorial, so processing them may be delayed to a meeting when
we have more time. A second issue is who controls the text of ISO 8879
and thus determines when the amendments are merged in and a new text is
printed.

Model John Oberholzer

A new merged text has been issued as an editor\'s draft (N650).

Vocabulary

The report was published July 15; a new editor is needed to maintain the
document until the next edition is issued.

Context-Sensitive Editor Mike Cowlishaw

A new draft (N626) has been issued, which contains comments from Canada.
Only a short meeting will be required.

Retroactive Conversion Martin Bryan

No real restructure seems to be needed, but the current draft (N672) is
quite incomplete; there will be a session on Wednesday.

DSSSL Sharon Adler

The first working draft will be issued after this meeting.

SPDL Steve Strasen

Two days were spent in London classifying comments on SC18 N1402. This
meeting should be able to review the comments and produce a working
draft to consider in January (with a possibility of a DP thereafter).

Techniques Anders Berglund

Results from the JTC1 ballot are just in. The U.K. asked for expansion
of the sections on document analysis and describing mathematics. Canada
has made comments on link that might be better addressed in a new
technical report (which might be a by-product of the work on DSSSL).

Fonts Ed Smura

As indicated earlier in the AFII report, one result of the SWG on RAs
has been a new DIS, 10036, made mostly from the old Parts 3 and 4 of DIS
9541. The old Parts 1, 2, and 5 (as well as the remainder of 3 and 4)
have been merged into a draft for a new Part 1. Because of the liaison
meeting with SC2 and SC24, there will be a new vocabulary.

The meeting with SC2 resolved that they were interested in encoding the
content of documents, whereas SC18 is concerned for the representation
of appearance. The association of glyphs with codes will be done in
SC18, but SC2 will review. SC2 is working on multibyte encodings, and in
the process they may encode more characters for publishing applications.

Steve Strasen added that we will continue with the registry of glyphs
(working with ANSI, as described above). Association of glyphs with
codes is context dependent, which SC2 is not interested in; nor are they
interested in developing an architecture of associations.

In the proposed restructuring of the Font standard, the new Part 1 will
be an architecture, and the new Part 2 will cover matters that would
have been in old Parts 6 and 7. The documents will be submitted for a
second DIS ballot.

At this meeting the comments on Parts 1▒5 will be reviewed, and some new
attributes for Part 5 will be considered. The new editors will be Smura
for Part 1 and Al Griffee for Part 2. They will do DIS 10036 jointly.

The only other issue is that SC24 is interested in the representation of
glyphs: they would like a CGM encoding for shapes.

Smura mentioned that AFII had contacted the standards body in the PRC.
The PRC wants to hold a conference on glyphs and has invited papers.
(The group thought that WG8 could not have a formal role in that but
left AFII to arrange what they saw fit so long as they made it clear
that they did not speak for ISO/IEC and their committees.)

The convenor announced that the Working Group would remain in plenary
session until sufficient progress had been made on the topics of overlap
and mutual concern among the projects.

Continued Plenary: Tuesday

Morning discussion

The second day\'s plenary began with a presentation by Ed Smura on the
restructuring of the Fonts standard. As this is a new DIS, it will need
a full six-month ballot; it will be distributed along with the
reballotting of 9541

The new DIS 10036 will be formed by extracting the registration of
glyphs from Part 3 and the collections from Part 4. To these will
probably be added the registration forms developed by AFII.

The remains of old Parts 1▒5 will become a new part one on glyph and
font architecture. There will be four kinds of naming authorities:
¬standard║, according to ISO 10036, ICDs, and National Bodies.

The old Part 6 and the material that was planned for Part 7 will become
the new Part 2, on subsets and encodings.

Jim Mason remarked that it should be kept clear throughout that there
are two kinds of encodings: data and wrappers. That is, data
identification (e.g., finding a specific character in a font resource)
is different from shape representation.

Joan Smith remarked that WG8 should be careful about editors: They
should be members in good standing of WG8 and should be familiar with
the requirements for editing standards in ISO. (Smura expects that he
and Griffee will be the editors.)

Smura remarked that the SC2 meeting had suggested that much of the
current explanatory material be moved to informative annexes. It is also
likely that the material on individual shape-encoding techniques will
also be in normative annexes. Griffee remarked that it may be useful to
separate the representation of font references and of glyph metrics from
that of shapes.

Charles Goldfarb reiterated that font interchange is at two levels: it
might be possible to do 9541 as the interchange format for references
and resources and create a new standard under the same work item for
shape representation. Dwight McBain said he could conceive of separating
references from metrics, but that shapes might be seen as a special kind
of metrics. We should examine what sorts of information are needed by
the clients of the standard, composition systems and printing systems.
Goldfarb responded that he had in mind the difference between a font
resource, which might be very modular so materials could be selected
from it, and a font object, which might be highly optimized and
integrated into the system that used it. McBain asked whether a font
server should have to support both kinds of approach.

Matt Foley suggested that the continuing discussion get down to the
level of our fundamental assumptions about how things operate.

Afternoon discussion

The afternoon discussion examined interface points to the systems being
developed in WG8. The discussion was wide ranging, with ideas evolving
and sometimes changing considerably over the course of the afternoon.

We generally agreed that input from external sources to an editing or
composition system would come as strings of codes defined as SC2
normally thinks of them. But after composition, what is passed between a
formatter and an imager, although in a type of interchange, may not be
easily representable only in codes as SC2 generally thinks of them.

There may need to be two kinds of maps between codes and the semantics
we associate with them. One type is the interest of editors and
formatters. It may be a glyph table and will certainly involve SGML
issues. The other is of interest to formatters and imagers and will be a
DSSSL-SPDL issue. Perhaps it will involve glyph indexes or maps between
cardinal numbers and glyph identifiers.

It was generally agreed that font resources need not be ordered and that
font objects may have a glyph index table into the contents of a
resource.

The afternoon concluded with a general discussion of fallback (and
error-recovery) philosophies.

Continued Plenary: Wednesday

Wednesday\'s discussion was concerned largely with developing an agreed
set of principles for the future development of DIS 9541, as this was
the point of contact between DSSSL and SPDL.

Most of the discussion was about selection criteria (since 9541 does not
contain algorithms). A ¬font reference║ may be a misnomer because
callout to a font resource is really a selection of the attributes in
it. A resource and a reference thus have the same overall structure. A
provider *must* supply values for all required attributes in a resource.
A user *may* supply values for what is needed. The information supplied
in a resource and a reference differ because what is required to supply
a font may not be the same as what is of interest to a specific user in
a given instance.

The discussion of future development resulted in a paper, N689, which
was accepted at the closing plenary.

After some discussion of whether there were differences between font
referencing and font fallback and between information carrled before
formatting and after it and the implications of line-length maintenance,
the group decided to defer further discussion to later meetings and to
break up into project sessions.

Closing Plenary

Dwight McBain made a presentation of issues in Japanese typography at
the beginning of the session, and the Japanese delegation presented an
additional document (N705) on the same topic.

The remainder of the plenary was devoted to discussion of the
recommendations contained in N691.

Recommendation 1

Accepted.

Recommendation 2

Accepted.

Recommendation 3

The relationship between the editing instructions and Annex B of the
U.S. Comments was clarified, particularly in terms of the new
understanding of the relationship between a character code map and a
glyph index table.

Accepted.

Recommendation 4

Accepted.

Recommendation 5

The text of the recommendation as originally distributed was changed to
that included in N703, as revised. Mr. Yamazaki raised the issue that
more than ISBNs should be acceptable: the American Association of
Publishers and other groups are looking at supplementary identifiers.

Accepted.

Recommendation 6

Changes to Item 11 of N689 were proposed by Alan Griffee and Carsten
Borman; the changes were accepted. There was also discussion of what was
agreed to in Item 3.

The document was accepted.

Recommendation 7

Alan Griffee made some revisions to his document, N700. He wanted to
make sure that four informative annexes from the old Part 6 would get
into the new Part 2. He also assured the group that this proposed
outline reflected the effects of the SWG on RAs and the meeting with SC2
and SC24.

Charles Goldfarb requested the Convenor to check with the SC18
Secretariat to see whether the proposed Part 3 could be given a new
number (rather than being part of 9541) without requiring a New Work
Item. After additional discussion by Dwight McBain, the convenor agreed
to pursue the topic with the Secretariat and advise Griffee so he could
revise the paper.

Accepted.

Recommendation 8

Liaisons:

ASMO (N695) The convenor agreed to query the Secretariat about whether a
WG could have a liaison with a standards organization.

SC24 (N696) This should be proposed text for SC18 to send to SC24.

TC29 (N697) Peter Robinson will ensure delivery to himself.

WGs 3&5 (N699 Rev) Versions will also be developed for transmission
through SC18 to the appropriate group in CCITT.

All accepted.

Recommendation 9

Accepted

Recommendation 10 (new)

N690 was accepted, with several clarifications to be handled by the
convenor.

Recommendation 11 (new)

N706 was accepted as an incomplete list of interproject issues.

Recommendation 12 (new)

With thanks to AFNOR for hosting the meeting and providing copying
services above and beyond the call of duty, the meeting was adjourned.