From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Dec 31 2002 - 21:37:57 EST
At 05:18 PM 12/31/2002, Kevin Brown wrote:
>By "contains all Adobe's in-house production names" do you mean the
>glyphs U+F6BD - U+F8FE? If so, these were in AGL 1.2 (Oct 98) as well.
No, I mean the alternative, human-friendly *names* for glyphs that were
formerly identified only by AFII numbers or uniXXXX names. For example:
afii57415;0627
alefarabic;0627
In the previous AGL, only the first name was recorded; the second name is a
production name used internally at Adobe during font development but,
traditionally, replaced in the final font by the AFII number. As far as I
know, only the AFII number (or uni0627) is recognised by ATM, Distiller,
etc. and mapped to the correct Unicode value.
> >I am not aware of anything in Adobe software that favours AGL names above
> >uniXXXX names. It is perfectly safe to ignore the AGL completely, even for
> >basic Latin characters if you so choose.
>
>I had heard that there could be a potential for problems with Acrobat
>when distilling with fonts which had uniXXXX names for glyphs for which
>AGL names existed?
David Lemon at Adobe mentioned to me during the summer that Adobe was
considering ditching the AFII-based names in the AGL and using uniXXXX
names instead for things like Arabic, since having two human-unfriendly
numbering systems, one of them totally obsolete, is really daft. I don't
know if they've followed through on that, but it suggested to me that there
was no problem with this approach. Since then I have discovered a third
party developer who has been relying on the Arabic AFII number names in
their apps, so I've avoided making the switch to uniXXXX names, but I'm not
aware of any issues with Adobe's own apps. It would be a problem if a font
contained two separate glyphs, one with the AGL name and one with a uniXXXX
name mapped to the same character, but that is something pretty obvious to
avoid.
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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