From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Jan 02 2003 - 18:45:40 EST
Today I received this clarification from David Lemon at Adobe. It seems I
was mistaken in thinking that the new human-friendly names were Adobe
production names: they are, in fact, names used by Apple, as explained by
David:
__________
>John,
>Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
>
>The new AGL collection can indeed be confusing, but it's not a mistake as
>such. The AGL is a snapshot of the way things are, and is provided as a
>service to anyone who cares about the way some existing software may use
>glyph names. Much (if not all) of the duplication stems from Acrobat's
>decision a couple years ago to recognize the names Apple was using;
>although Apple's names were developed independently of Adobe's, it's
>useful to accept either source as input. For what it's worth, this is all
>rather old history, and both Apple and Microsoft have been standardizing
>on the (older) AGL names in their newer fonts where feasible.
>
>Adobe publishes the AGL to document a behavior; there is no request that
>anyone use these names for glyphs. The accompanying documentation - the
>"Unicode and Glyph Names" document - is cited at the head of the AGL
>document (line 5, "# See
>http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/unicodegn.html "). It
>details the relationship between AGL and Unicode, and Adobe's
>recommendations for using (or in the case of new fonts, not using) the
>AGL, and includes the statement:
>>For glyphs which correspond to characters in the Unicode standard, it is
>>recommended to build names with the "uni" prefix for BMP characters, and
>>with the "u" prefix for characters in the Unicode supplemental planes,
>>according to the rules given in section 2.
>[Section 6, Assigning glyph names in new fonts]
>
>We'd hoped that was sufficiently clear. Perhaps Mr Brown's confusion stems
>from the follow-on statement:
>>This does not mean that fonts will become invalid if they are made
>>without using the "uni" and "u" prefixes for glyph names. With one group
>>of exceptions, all names from the AGL v1.2 (see link in section 5)
>>currently work in all known cases as well names with the "uni" prefix.
>>The exceptions are the AGLv1.2 names which are associated with Unicode
>>Private Use Area values.
>
>We added this qualification because we're shipping thousands of OpenType
>fonts which use AGL (v1.2) names, as well as uniXXXX names. Although we
>may change these fonts in a future revision, they work reasonably and are
>technically valid. That is, the uniXXXX-naming behavior is merely a
>recommendation, not a requirement. Using AGL names, on the other hand, is
>neither required nor recommended; it's simply accepted.
>
>Please feel free to forward this email to the Unicode list, if you believe
>that would be helpful.
>- thanks,
> David Lemon
> Manager, Type Development
> Adobe Systems, Inc.
__________
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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