At 9:05 PM +1030 12/31/02, Kevin Brown wrote:
The main reasons to have short human-readable glyphnames are: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.
(1) to have name identifiers for un-encoded glyphs.
e.g. A.swash1 A.swash2 A.smallcap A.initialcap A.endflourish A_period.swash
(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.
Peter Lofting
Apple Fonts
