OpenType
A font format standard jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe, introduced in the late 1990s. It supports programmable feature tables including GSUB glyph substitution and GPOS glyph positioning, and is the dominant font format for desktop and web typography.
Timeline (last 90 days)
Modern font formats such as TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) are both based on vector descriptions.
OpenType ligature rules are based on pattern matching of character sequences and are not a Turing-complete tokenization algorithm, making it nearly infeasible to implement full BPE tokenization through font-internal rules alone.
The core idea behind Times New Bastard is to abuse the ligature feature in the OpenType font format.
The OpenType ligature feature automatically replaces specific character combinations with a specially designed merged glyph when those combinations appear, such as the fi and fl combinations.
OpenType defines complex typographic rules through two core tables—GSUB (Glyph Substitution) and GPOS (Glyph Positioning)—with the ligature feature belonging to a category of substitution rules within the GSUB table.
fonttools is the most mature OpenType font parsing and construction tool in the Python ecosystem, capable of reading and writing font file binary structures, modifying GSUB/GPOS rule tables, and repackaging to generate new fonts.
All Facts (6)
The OpenType ligature feature automatically replaces specific character combinations with a specially designed merged glyph when those combinations appear, such as the fi and fl combinations.
60%UnverifiedModern font formats such as TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) are both based on vector descriptions.
50%UnverifiedOpenType ligature rules are based on pattern matching of character sequences and are not a Turing-complete tokenization algorithm, making it nearly infeasible to implement full BPE tokenization through font-internal rules alone.
50%UnverifiedThe core idea behind Times New Bastard is to abuse the ligature feature in the OpenType font format.
50%UnverifiedOpenType defines complex typographic rules through two core tables—GSUB (Glyph Substitution) and GPOS (Glyph Positioning)—with the ligature feature belonging to a category of substitution rules within the GSUB table.
50%Unverifiedfonttools is the most mature OpenType font parsing and construction tool in the Python ecosystem, capable of reading and writing font file binary structures, modifying GSUB/GPOS rule tables, and repackaging to generate new fonts.
50%