[OpenType] [mpeg-OTspec] OpenType "Recommendations": First Four Glyphs in Fonts

[John Hudson]

On 14/07/15 05:21, Ken Lunde lunde at adobe.com [mpeg-OTspec] wrote:

> Anyway, the reason I am bringing up the issue of the "First Four Glyphs
> in Fonts" subsection is that many people who read it treat it as gospel,
> but actual practice indicates that there are no dependencies on GIDs 1
> through 3, in terms of their names and other characteristics. If anyone
> has any evidence to the contrary, that would be most interesting to me.

I can think of one possible tool dependency. When we made the Adobe 
Arabic, Devanagari, etc. fonts, we were dependent at the time on using 
the MS VOLT tool, since AFDKO at the time didn't support the all the 
functionality we needed. We made the CFF glyph set to Adobe's spec, 
without GID 1 and GID 2 as NULL and CR, but we discovered that VOLT 
seemed to expect the standard first four glyphs as per the 
recommendation, and that parts of some cmap subtables written by VOLT 
got messed up without them. We had to post-process the cmap table in TTX 
to clean it up. Since then, Sergey has provided an option for VOLT not 
to rewrite the cmap table, which can be used to bypass this dependency, 
but I mention it because I'm cautious about endorsing the view that 
there are no dependencies.

J.


-- 

John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks Ltd    www.tiro.com
Salish Sea, BC        tiro at tiro.com

Getting Spiekermann to not like Helvetica is like training
a cat to stay out of water. But I'm impressed that people
know who to ask when they want to ask someone to not like
Helvetica. That's progress. -- David Berlow