OpenType "Recommendations": First Four Glyphs in Fonts

[Ken Lunde]

Vladimir and others,

Has anyone considered making changes to the "First Four Glyphs in Fonts" subsection of the "Recommendations" section of the OpenType Specification to agree with common practice or modern OpenType font consumers? See:

  https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/recom.htm

We (meaning Adobe) looked into this about three years ago, and while such recommendations were meant to apply to OpenType fonts with TrueType outlines ('glyf' table), our conclusion was that we found that no modern environments depend on the presence nor characteristics of GIDs 1 through 3. GID+0 is special regardless of the underlying outline technology, but a single-item table doesn't make much sense. Also, the name of GID+0 is ".notdef" only for TrueType and name-keyed CFF fonts; CID-keyed CFF fonts have no glyph names.

Besides, I also suspect that that "Additional recommendations" are also suspect (pun intended). At the very least, we should consider adding a statement to the effect that these recommendations are based on older environments, and that modern environments no longer depend on them.

Regards...

-- Ken