From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Dec 31 2002 - 17:01:16 EST
At 01:22 PM 12/31/2002, Peter Lofting wrote:
>The main reasons to have short human-readable glyphnames are:
>
>(1) to have name identifiers for un-encoded glyphs.
> e.g. A.swash1 A.swash2 A.smallcap A.initialcap A.endflourish
> A_period.swash
These naming conventions may also be applied using uniXXXX format names,
and are so used in plenty of fonts for un-encoded variants of non-AGL
glyphs, e.g.:
uni06AB.swash uni06AB.swash2 uni06AB_uni06D2.final
>(2) to use these names in writing shaping behaviour rules. This applies to
>both OpenType and AAT (MIF) shaping rules.
>
>Writing glyph substitution/transformation algebra is much easier if the
>string is short, unbroken, and readable/recognizable. Unicode names don't
>fulfil all these criteria and the uniXXXX format is opaque, which prevents
>debugging and re-use of the shaping rule libraries.
The uniXXXX format is not opaque, but it is obviously harder to work with
than human-readable names *during production* unless you happen to have
memorised the Unicode Standard. But the AGL and the Adobe glyph naming
conventions are specifically concerned with final, shipping font glyph
names, not with names used in production. This is why I am bewildered by
the sudden appearance, in this new AGL, of all Adobe's internal production
names. The implication of including names in the AGL is that these names
will be recognised by ATM, CoolType and other Adobe text engines and mapped
to corresponding Unicode values. Unless all these engines have always been
able to recognise the Adobe production names included in the new AGL, it
can't be a good idea to include them, because fonts using these names would
not work with older versions of ATM etc. If these engines can recognise all
these names, then all the new AGL really does is document a set of
acceptable alternative names for some characters, that may be used in
shipping fonts instead of othe AGL names or uniXXXX names. I continue to
think that this version of the AGL may simply be an error, and that Adobe
did not intend to publicise their internal production names in this way.
At Tiro, we have an extensive set of human-friendly production names used
for Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, etc., but these are always swapped out before
we ship a font and replaced by AGL 1.2 (where they differ, e.g. the AFII
names for Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew) or uniXXXX names.
I disagree that using uniXXXX names in production would 'prevent ... re-use
of shaping rule libraries'. Human-friendly production names are simply a
convenience, and I can't think of anything we do with them (including
deriving lookup rules from glyph repertoire spreadsheets) that we couldn't
do using uniXXXX names with the same conventions for un-encoded glyphs.
Happy New Year, Peter et al.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
A book is a visitor whose visits may be rare,
or frequent, or so continual that it haunts you
like your shadow and becomes a part of you.
- al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals
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