BobH On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 5:34 AM, BobH <ne1oqz...@sneakemail.com> wrote: > You may do as you wish, of course. And you need not reply to this, but lest > I be misunderstood... > > > On 2013-06-22 at 5:28 Steve White stevan.white-at-gmail.com |OpenType stuff| > wrote: > > Bob, the Adobe Glyph List is deprecated. It has not been maintained, > as it was an unfortunate idea to begin with. > > The link I gave refers both to the > > AGL (which, although not deprecated in the tradition sense, it is, by > conscious decision, not being extended) and > The Adobe Glyph List for New Fonts. > > The latter is far from deprecated -- it is the standard way of naming glyphs > for most type designers I know. > I do not have access to statistics of how many fonts follow Adobe's convention. That might be helpful information in this discussion. However, I do know many fonts just ignore it, because it is very ugly, and not very helpful.
> For their part, Microsoft and ISO both recommend names conform to the Adobe > standard. > I know. The ostensible reason for this naming scheme does not make sense, as I said. The only other argument I have ever heard for propagating it is to support legacy software. (A few printer problems too have occasionally been reported that *might* be related to glyph names,but they are few and far between, and I can only regard this as firmware bugs.) My catch on it is, it would be better for the legacy software to be replaced, than to force this ugly naming convention on new fonts. (BTW I still have never seen the bug Tae Wong mentioned with my own eyes, so I can't be 100% sure the bug really was due to glyph naming. A test file and thorough description of the problem might resolve that question.) > We largely ignore it (except for some of the names which were good > ideas individually). > > Certainly your prerogative. But if one chooses this route, I'd question > including any names at all in the finished font -- just move to post fmt3 > table. > This is certainly a thought. The usefulness of glyph names in the font binaries is questionable. Human-readable glyph names are very helpful to anybody who inspects the font, to understand what the font designer intended. If you've ever dealt with Indic or Arabic scripts, you know the tables can be almost impenetrable. Do glyph names belong in the binary though? What purpose do they serve there? One view has been that the binaries and the SFD file are interchangeble, the SFD being merely a human-readable version. I have usually taken this view. However, there are other bits of information in the SFD file that is not supported in the binaries (table names anyway---I can't think of anything else except info caches). So the SFD may be regarded as "source". In the view that the SFD file is source, and given that with GPLed software the user must have access to the source, it makes sense to say, an interested user could always look into the SFD file to find the glyph names. Of course for the purposes of text display, all this human-readable stuff is extraneous. Removing the glyph names wouldn't have any effect on the PDF text-copy issue, I think. (I only know the one way I mentioned to resolve that.) I wonder if it would make Tae Wong's problem go away -- but is making that problem to go away the right thing to do? Maybe that software ought to be fixed. So it isn't clear to me your proposal is toward the bug at hand. Bob, I'll think about your proposal. Let me know if you have further thoughts on it. It might be worth opening a bug report on it, where it can be further discussed. Thanks!
