VORG — Vertical Origin Table (OpenType 1.9)

This optional table specifies the y coordinate of the vertical origin of every glyph in the font.

This table may be optionally present only in CFF OpenType fonts. If present in OpenType fonts containing TrueType outline data, it must be ignored. This is because this table is not needed for fonts with TrueType outlines: the Vertical Metrics ('vmtx') and Glyph Data ('glyf') tables provide all the information necessary to accurately calculate the y coordinate of a glyph’s vertical origin. See the “Vertical Origin and Advance Height” section in the 'vmtx' table specification for more details.

This table was added to version 1.3 of the OpenType specification. Note that the 'vmtx' and Vertical Header ('vhea') tables continue to be required for all OpenType fonts that support vertical writing. Advance heights must continue to be obtained from the 'vmtx' table; that is the only place they are stored.

If a VORG table is present in a CFF OpenType font, the application may choose to obtain the y coordinate of a glyph’s vertical origin either:

1. directly from the VORG, or:
2. by first calculating the top of the glyph’s bounding box from the CFF charstring data and then adding to it the glyph’s top side bearing from the 'vmtx' table.

The former method offers the advantage of increased accuracy and efficiency, since bounding box results calculated from the CFF charstring as in the latter method can differ depending on the rounding decisions and data types of the bounding box algorithm. The latter method provides compatibility for applications that are either unaware of or choose not to support the VORG.

Thus, the VORG doesn’t add any new font metric values per se; it simply improves accuracy and efficiency for applications, since the intermediate step of calculating bounding boxes from the CFF charstring is rendered unnecessary.

See the section OpenType CJK Font Guidelines for more information about constructing CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) fonts.

Vertical Origin Table Format

Type	Name	Description
uint16	majorVersion	Major version (starting at 1). Set to 1.
uint16	minorVersion	Minor version (starting at 0). Set to 0.
int16	defaultVertOriginY	The y coordinate of a glyph’s vertical origin, in the font’s design coordinate system, to be used if no entry is present for the glyph in the vertOriginYMetrics array.
uint16	numVertOriginYMetrics	Number of elements in the vertOriginYMetrics array.

This is immediately followed by the vertOriginYMetrics array (if numVertOriginYMetrics is non-zero), which has numVertOriginYMetrics elements of the following format:

Type	Name	Description
uint16	glyphIndex	Glyph index.
int16	vertOriginY	Y coordinate, in the font’s design coordinate system, of the vertical origin of glyph with index glyphIndex.

This array must be sorted by increasing glyphIndex, and must not have more than one element with the same glyphIndex. In a size-optimized implementation, glyphs whose vertical origin’s y coordinate equals defaultVertOriginY will not have an entry in this array.

If all glyphs in a font share the same defaultVertOriginY value, the length of the VORG table will be 8 bytes in a size-optimized implementation, since the vertOriginYMetrics array will be absent.

Typically only the full-width Latin glyphs in an East Asian font will have entries in the vertOriginYMetrics array. Glyphs rotated for vertical writing, as used in the Vertical Alternates and Rotation ('vrt2') feature, for example, can take advantage of the default value if they are designed appropriately.

In the following example of a complete VORG table for a 1000-unit-em font, every glyph in the font is specified as having a vertOriginY of 880 except for glyphs with glyph indices 10, 12, and 13:

majorVersion         =1
minorVersion         =0
defaultVertOriginY   =880
numVertOriginYMetrics=3
--- vertOriginYMetrics[index]=(glyphIndex,vertOriginY)
[0]=(10,889)
[1]=(12,861)
[2]=(13,849)