Re: [Freefont-bugs] New glyphs are unixxxx while other glyphs are uniXXXX.

[BobH]

On 2013-06-25 at 18:15 Steve White stevan.white-at-gmail.com |OpenType 
stuff| wrote:
> > On 2013-06-25 at 9:12 you wrote:
> >
> > I've experimented with this, and now I think I spoke too soon.
> > But maybe I don't understand your suggestion.
> >
> > The glyphs *must* have unique names.

First, apologies for addressing only one of the two areas your statement 
raised.  My email was focused on whether or not glyphs had to have names 
at all -- I didn't address whether names had to be unique.

To address that fully: *IF* the glyphs have names, then (except for 
".notdef") names should be used only once within the font. Or said 
another way: glyph names must be unique except that many glyphs can be 
named ".notdef" (which really means it has no name).

> I mixed things up there.  Internally references are made by glyph ID,
> so I know of no structural reason why they must be unique.
> FontForge correctly insists on uniqueness when names are being set.

Right.

> I'm talking about font generation by FontForge.
> I find no way to *remove* the glyph names.
> Only ways to replace them with other sets of glyph names.
> Am I missing something?

I think we're on a rabbit trail here (because the OpenType spec 
recommends that ttf-flavored fonts should have glyph names) but if you 
wanted to pursue this then you need to see if there are settings in 
FontForge that will cause it to generate a Format 3 post table. If not, 
you can use any number of font hacking tools to change the post table. 
If you want help I can show you how to use the Font::TTF Perl module to 
do this.

> > so I'm
> > trying to understand what process(es) you believe do require names.
> ??  Very few. Have you misunderstood me.

I take this to mean that you use the names for development process but 
beyond that don't think the names have purpose.

However, I suspect that neither of us know whether names are essential 
to correctly render a font on all variety of platforms/drivers/printers 
that might be required.

> It's the AGLFN names I don't like. They amount to a loss of 
> information, besides being ugly. There are a few AGL names that are 
> just wrong (and there are also a few Unicode names that are just wrong 
> too). These things happen. To be honest, more names in FreeFont are 
> just wrong, than either the AGL or Unicode. But they're *our* names, 
> and have other advantages too (brevity, etc). But again, the 
> functioning of outside code must not depend on glyph names. Keep me 
> thinking, Bob! 

I'm curious what possible "loss of information" you might be aware of.

I assume you understand that you can use one set of glyph names during 
font development and then, prior to packaging, change the names to be 
AGL conformant?  This is a pretty common practice in the industry.

The focus of my argument all along has not been what names you use for 
development -- no one cares about that at all -- but it is what gets 
delivered for end-users that, imo, should conform to existing standards.

Bob

PS: This *whole* very long thread started out from a bug report that 
"New glyphs are unixxxx while other glyphs are uniXXXX" -- I don't think 
you can argue that one is less ugly than the other, but I can argue that 
one has less information than the other (from the perspective of 
processes based on Adobe standards).