__________
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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
