[XeTeX] About Microsoft YaHei font

[Jonathan Kew]

On 29 May 2007, at 10:42 am, Dongsheng Song wrote:

> Yes.
>
> In FontForge, the font name is 'MicrosoftYaHei', after change to
> 'MicrosoftYaHeiBold', it works.
>
> In FontCreator 5.5, it's more clear. The font's 'postscript name' for
> 'Chinese - PRC' is 'MicrosoftYaHeiBold', But for 'English - United
> States' is 'MicrosoftYaHei', it should be a typo.

OK, this is a bug in the font. According to the OpenType spec (see  
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/name.htm), the "English -  
US" name is the only one that matters; the "Chinese" one is  
irrelevant. (Remember that this name is for internal use in software/ 
printers, not for presentation to humans.)

The description of name ID 6 begins:

<quote>
Postscript name for the font; Name ID 6 specifies a string which is  
used to invoke a PostScript language font that corresponds to this  
OpenType font. If no name ID 6 is present, then there is no defined  
method for invoking this font on a PostScript interpreter.

OpenType fonts which include a name with name ID of 6 shall include  
these two names with name ID 6, and characteristics as follows:

Platform: 1 [Macintosh]; Platform-specific encoding: 0 [Roman];  
Language: 0 [English].

Platform: 3 [Microsoft]; Platform-specific encoding: 1 [Unicode];  
Language: 0x409 [English (American)].

Names with name ID 6 other than the above two, if present, must be  
ignored.
</quote>

Various software, including the Cocoa text system on Mac OS X, as  
well as Postscript printers in general, will rely on the PS name as  
the primary identifier of the font; and so if the regular and bold  
fonts have the same PS name (as in this case), the software will not  
be able to reliably access both faces.

I would suggest reporting this as a bug to Microsoft (or whoever else  
distributes this font).

JK