From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011015 BuildID: 2001101516 Apple's ATSUI (I believe the acronym stands for Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging, or something like that) enables all sorts of fine typographic control of the way fonts are rendered. Anyone who ever used the retired QuickDraw GX technology has seen the effects: beautifully rendered type that takes advantage of elements like optical scaling, ligatures, conditional swashes, improved visual justification, etc. These elements can produced rendered text that is easier to read onscreen, looks better when printed, and overall just improves the subjective user experience with an application. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/ttgx.htm describes (in terms of QuickDraw GX, a deprecated API) the sort of things that are possible. My understanding is that ATSUI reimplements all of this type functionality. http://fonts.apple.com has more info about some of the capabilities of ATSUI.

See Additional Comments From bobj@netscape.com 1999-04-23 18:13 in bug 2156 Seems this was considered to be too slow.

That bug appears to have been for Mac OS 8.5 and previous. The situation may be different on OS X.

Confirming as an RFE. GX fonts were indeed rolled into ATSUI, and so this may actually apply to all Mac Mozillas. I mentioned this in bug 74245, to which this probably bears a somewhat close relationship. Frank Tang has also been doing work in Fizzilla's text internals which may have bearing on this (see bug 103669). Obviously there will need to be some UI for this on the Fonts prefs panel.

CC'ing Pinkerton to start.

I have remembered that the old fancy GX font features are now referred to as "Apple Advanced Typography," and so that is what this bug should refer to. Updating summary. Specifically, pure AAT features include Line Layout and Variations. Variations will, for instance, make possible the sort of truly variable font weight intended to be used for CSS. (Reference [http://fonts.apple.com/TTQualSpec/QS01/FQS1.html].)

Marking Mac/All.

OpenType may also provide this sort of advanced typographic control.

My understanding is that the advanced features built into some of the included OSX fonts (namely Hoefler, Apple Chancery, etc.) are already exposed via ATSUI. I don't know if special fonts above and beyond the ones provided with the OS would be necessary to take advantage of OpenType.

Does the new post-OS X 10.1.5 Quartz rendering stuff help with AAT too?

Another possible use of this technology would be to display uppercase---rather than lowercase---numeralss in small-caps text when available.

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->Mac GFX.

-> simon. this is probably a dupe.

*** Bug 236023 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I wonder what makes this bug depend on bug 121540 rather than be its dupe.

See comment 5. This bug is about enabling further AAT features beyond just ATSUI.

Just about all the links to other documentation in this bug are broken. Does anyone know if any of this is still worth pursuing? Is there any of this that was implemented and might be considered as usefull/dead code at this point?

IIRC Core Text is the new thing to do on 10.5. IMO it would be a waste to implement an older version that will be deprecated soon. http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/tracks/macosx.html says: "Adopt the new Core Text APIs that replace the deprecated QuickDraw Text APIs. Learn how to replace your handling of Pascal and C strings, text encodings, fonts, styles, layouts, and more with Core Text and other Leopard APIs. <b>If you're currently using ATSUI to achieve simple Unicode text rendering, learn how you can switch to Core Text for faster rendering.</b>"

Yes, Core Text is the right target, but Leopard only.

Since I dont have any Beta-Access to Apple's new Leopard SDKs... Is it possible to use Core Text on 10.5 and continue using (whatever we currently do) on previous versions? An other option would be to implement Core Text after the 1.9 Branch and make Gecko 2.0 Leopard-only. FYI: I've filed Bug 389074 to switch to Core Text.

The implementation of ATSUI (atleast Ligature support like Safari) is absolutely essential to view Unicode text that needs Level 2 implementation. We need this support not only for cosmetic changes to the rendered text but also for plain reading of Unicode text. Hence it needs to be done on top priority.

Would this be likely to fix bug 369967 for Tiger (and likewise would Core Text fix it for Leopard)? If not, is there another meta bug about text on Mac that I can set that bug as blocking? I couldn't find one. Following the test case I attached to that bug, text rendering has changed frequently since Cocoa was switched on. Thanks!

That blog post has a bug of its own: bug 440441.

Pretty sure this is a WONTFIX in favor of implementing CoreText (bug 389074). Josh?

Agreed, WONTFIX.