As if font developers haven't got enough new stuff to deal with, now Adobe have just updated the Adobe Glyph List. (v2.0 September 2002). It is now nearly FIVE times the size (4,910 names) compared to the so-called "last ever" version, v1.2 October 1998 (1,050 names).
The big question is why have they done it at all? The document "Unicode and Glyph Names" (http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/type/unicodegn.html) states - "The purpose of the Adobe Glyph Naming convention is to support the computation of a Unicode character string from a sequence of glyphs. This is achieved by specifying a mapping from glyph names to character strings" OK, but what I can't find in the document is a clear statement regarding what exactly an AGL glyph name achieves that a generic uniXXXX name doesn't - apart from the dubious benefits of human readability. And if there is no user advantage, then why expand the list? The new specification also states "Font producers are encouraged to follow this specification in naming their glyphs" Why? And what happens if I don't? They don't say. Was there any industry pressure for an extension to the AGL? I've certainly never heard of any. Quite the contrary - in fact I probably wouldn't be quite so uptight about this if there hadn't been such apparently universal agreement amongst those "in the know" that the 1998 AGL was NEVER going to be updated. So now that a new version has popped up "out of the blue" after 4 years I think there's some pretty damn good reasons to resist its adoption. My concern is that the Adobe Glyph List may well exist for the sole benefit of Adobe, especially if they insist on making the functionality of their applications eg Acrobat and InDesign and also their PostScript font format partially rely on it. Perhaps Adobe are having a just little bit of trouble letting go? Maybe they need to eek just a little extra life out of the "old" PostScript format? But maybe if Adobe's software can't work without alphabetic glyph names, well maybe they might just have to think about changing their software. Shock! Horror! Unicode names (uniXXXX) are simple, short and unambiguous. They map one-to-one in BOTH directions with codepoints and, gee, maybe in a few years we won't even need in-built glyph names at all (ie we'll just use the codepoints). After all, developers of large international fonts have got quite accustomed to most of the glyphs in their fonts not having humanreadable names. I know Unicode names are not particularly user-friendly but with 65,536 possible BMP codepoints I think we've all accepted by now that there are never going to be 65,536 shorthand humanreadable names, so why does Adobe keep creating them? And anyway, it's only ever going to be people who speak English who will thank you for the new names (and of course since the major part of the BMP and the world's population is not even Latin, let alone English, the majority are not going to be thanking anyone at all!) When I definitely needed a human readable name for a glyph (or conversely, a unicode value for a particular name) I simply refer to the Unicode Names List downloaded from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/. It's always instantly available to me (via my Apple Menu, if you must know). The clear advantages of the Unicode Names List over the AGL are (1) it's got five times the names of the new AGL (2) the glyph descriptions are more exact (particularly as they are not limited to 32 characters), (3) the Unicode list gives English descriptions of the large number NON-human readable AGL names ie those in the form "afii61573" and (4) the Unicode Names List is created and moderated by the same body which assigns the codepoints. Given this, I find it amazing (and unfortunate) that the AGL has achieved the penetration it has! There is no reason why a special version of the Unicode Names List database (currently more than 23,000 characters - over a third of the BMP) could not be linked to applications like InDesign and FontLab etc to give users up-to date access to the complete set of Unicode glyph descriptions instead of an extremely small subset (ie the AGL) of the BMP built into the font itself. And remember, the number of names available would be five times as many as with the AGL and the descriptions would be more human readable. What I had in mind would be like the glyph name database built into Windows Character Map which appears to be sourced directly from the Unicode Names List. The case for built-in human readable glyph names is further reduced by the fact that the major font editing application, FontLab, by default illustrates all glyphs in its bitmap layer so characters can be easily accessed by reference to their codepoint and/or their physical bitmap representation. You might think that if the new AGL 2.0 had at least ONE thing going for it, it would be exhaustiveness. With nearly 5000 glyph names you would think that every last latin-based glyph would be assigned a name. But no! There are gaps, inexplicable from my point of view, even within such major sub-ranges as Latin Extended-B. For instance there are NO glyph names assigned in AGL 2.0 to U+01F6, 01F7, 01F8 and 01F9. And what's more, there appears that there is no prospect that names EVER will be assigned to these codepoints, because Adobe states clearly in the introduction to the specification: "Because it is anticipated that this specification will be implemented in many pieces of software, and that revising consistently all those implementations is unlikely, this specification is intended to be stable, i.e. never revised. In particular, it is intended that no mappings will ever be added to the AGL" Go figure! (It's not that I WANT it to revised of course. I just want it to go away!) The dozen or so duplicates in AGL1.2 (eg hyphen, fraction, Delta etc) have always been one of the banes of a font developer's life and not a small argument in its own right for the use of the "alternate" uniXXXX name format. Adobe themselves used to suggest resolving the problems of AGL duplicates by assigning uniXXXX names to one of the duplicates. But now Adobe have given these former duplicates unique names. For example, U+002D and U+00AD both used to have the AGL name "hyphen", so we used to rename the second glyph "uni00AD". But in AGL2.0, U+00AD now has its own name "sfthyphen". I'm sure Adobe are very proud of themselves for fixing these duplicates (it only took 5 years!) but do we now all have to change "uni00AD" to "sfthyphen" to make sure our fonts will work properly in Adobe applications? And if not, I ask again why did they bother? (By the way, I hope Adobe have got a damn good reason for calling it "sfthyphen" and not "softhyphen"!) Incidentally, I see that duplicates have not been eliminated entirely from the Adobe Glyph List. But now the duplicates are in the codepoints rather than in the names! For example, both "gravecomb" (the AGL1.2 name) and "gravecmb" (the AGL2.0 name) both get mapped to U+0300. Sigh! The extensive public use of the Private Use area (albeit in the Corporate Use Subarea U+F6BD - U+F8FE) by the Adobe Glyph List continues undiminished with version 2.0. Some of the recent almost unanimous arguments on this list against William Overington's never-ending PUA proposals seem pretty lame when you see the AGL's very public (and apparently unchallenged) appropriation of a not-insignificant part the PUA by Adobe/Apple. If Adobe and Apple feel so strongly about the PUA glyphs they've "locked up" so publicly since 1997 then why don't they officially apply to the Unicode Consortium to have them included in the Unicode Standard like the rest of us have to do? I think that the continued inclusion of these PUA codepoints in the AGL is something that the Unicode Consortium should not remain silent on, particularly when you consider that simply by virtue of their presence in the AGL these glyphs now appear in the default font templates for FontLab. In other words, these AGL glyphs are not a million miles from becoming a defacto standard through the back door. William Overington could not, in his wildest dreams, have hoped for a comparable result! Finally, Adobe haven't made things any easier for font developers by reversing the sequence of the data in the lines of the AGL compared to earlier versions. Version 1.2 has the unicode scalar value followed by the glyph name (semi-colon delimited). In version 2.0 the glyph name comes first, thereby making it harder for those of us who may need to manually modify the new AGL file so it can be read by such programs as FontLab. Thanks a lot! One has to wonder whether any font developers and font-editing software vendors were even consulted during the development of this new AGL version? FontLab 4.5 was released in late December (three months AFTER the release of AGL 2.0) but it shipped with the OLD version of the AGL so maybe that answers my question. I only found out about the new AGL version today, and that was completely by accident. I guess I must be in the wrong loop. I have many, many fonts set up with uniXXXX names for glyphs that were not in AGL v1.2. Now AGL v2.0 has assigned alphabetic names to many of those glyphs, so the answer I REALLY need to get from Adobe is whether I will need to update those uniXXXX names to AGL 2.0 names in order to guarantee FULL functionality of those fonts (TrueType, PostScript - Mac and Windows - and both flavours of OpenType) in Adobe applications and elsewhere???? If the answer to my question is that the new names are not mandatory, I for one will be more than happy to give AGL 2.0 a wide berth - but my gut feeling is that we could be stuck with it, especially if we just sit back and accept it. I think that in this age of fully Unicode fonts, externally-defined alphabetic (humanreadable) glyph names built into fonts just add to a font developer's workload for NO GOOD REASON. And arcane mappings like the Adobe Glyph List with its duplicates, its apparently arbitrary omissions, its stated intention to never be exhaustive, its many typographically inaccurate names, its mixture of humanreadable and non-humanreadable names, its name changes from one version to the next, the absurd interval between updates, and its public assignment of names to Private Use Area codepoints, all make the AGL probably just about the WORST mapping that a font developer could ever imagine. My feeling is that if it didn't have the imprimatur of a company as large as Adobe it would have been discarded years ago as a bad joke! I really think it's time to bury it. Happy New Year! Kevin Brown ***************************************** Kevin Brown's G R A P H I T Y ! DIGITAL TYPE SPECIALIST * GRAPHIC DESIGN 147 Magill Road, Stepney S.A. AUSTRALIA 5069 Phone/Fax: +61 (0)8 8362 8664 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Est.1979 *****************************************
