Re: [Fontforge-users] Glyph names, was: How to break apart and AltUni pair

[George W. <gw...@si...>]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 11:43, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> I've seen U+0277 called "closed omega", although I think it is
> in origin actually an oo-ligature -- which MUFI however uses
> with another canonical shape.  Another name I've seen for
> U+0277 is "fanny", which I guess is as good a descriptive
> name as any.  I wonder of it is necessary or possible to
> make Adobe to adopt any of these names in order to use them?
> While I understand the need for standardization I have a
> gut reaction against seing Adobe -- or the Unicode Consortium --
> as a fount of wisdom for the naming of phonetic symbols.
The Unicode consortium has not standardized glyph names. They have named
all the characters (with names that are generally too long to be used as
glyph names) but that is a subtly different thing.

Adobe has a list of standard names (several lists in fact -- Omega is a
difficult name because its meaning has changed, It used to refer to
U+2126, the ohm sign, and only later got reassigned to U+03A9 (Omega)).

The opentype standard says that if an opentype font contains glyph names
they should follow Adobe's naming conventions. Many of MicroSoft's fonts
do not. There was a raging argument about this on the OpenType list last
week.

Glyph names are important in type1 fonts because they are the only
indication of encoding. In fonts with a 'cmap' table the glyph name is
largely irrelevant -- however the opentype list pointed out that many
otf files get converted to type1 fonts and stored in pdf format. So once
again the glyph names MAY be the only indication of encoding and knowing
that encoding is important for searching the pdf file.

Which is a long winded way of saying that in otf/ttf files you can
almost ignore glyph name standards.