Subject:
Re: News of AFII: international standard registry of glyphs and
---------------------------------
Berthold:
You wanted more info about Adobe's choice not to use the AFII
registry. Here's an excerpt from a message I got from Adobe
back in June:
Thank you for your enquiry, and careful explanation of the
related issues. Adobe is definitely not using AFII numbers
anymore -- except for compatibility purposes. All of our
development work is now focused on OpenType and the use of
Unicode.
[end of excerpt]
I had written to Adobe after reading their document at
http://www2.adobe.com/supportservice/devrelations/typeforum/gly
fname.html
from which I copy the following excerpt:
... Names that cannot be composed of
published names could use the glyph ID numbers published by the
Association for Font Information Interchange (AFII), the
ISO-approved registrar of glyphs.
Since Technical Note #5089 was written, a number of changes
have occurred to take advantage of emerging industry standards.
For example, Adobe has recently adopted a number of glyph
names established by Microsoft, and AFII has ceased operation.
[end of excerpt]
Note the very last clause. As I had been trying to get info, I
was struck by the claim that AFII had closed their doors. Since
I subsequently had some correspondence with AFII, this claim is
apparently mistaken.
You suggested that the industry may not be ready for 32-bit
codes. I had not thought about that. Glyph IDs in TrueType
fonts are 16-bit, I believe, so that is an issue for TrueType.
Also, you're very right that numbers are much less useful for
working with glyphs than mneumonic strings.
You also suggested that Unicode is adequate as a glyph encoding
for many purposes. Apparently, Adobe is thinking along those
lines. It is a serious concern for us if they decide to carve
up the private use area and try to quasi-standardize it. We may
need to make heavy use of PUA for scripts that we work with
that are not close to being standardized in Unicode. What I
have seen of what Adobe wants to put into their are mostly
glyph variants, which don't need Unicode values if one has a
smart rendering system. Adobe has said that they're working
with Microsoft on OpenType (see the first quotation above). If
the two of them got OpenType right, Adobe wouldn't need to
assign PUA values to glyph variants. Unfortunately, Adobe and
MS appear not to have had much success in figuring out complex
script rendering issues in OpenType. (It has been years since
they first talked about this, and they have never provide
developers with anything on the proposed OT services libary.
Also, MS have since put together Uniscribe, which has no
connection to OT services libary. It remains to be seen whether
Uniscribe will obviate any need on Adobe's part to propose
Unicode values for variants.)
You said, "...Unicode is not about composing characters by
combining base and accent characters..." Au contraire! For an
app to be conformant to Unicode, it must be able to work with
such combinations. Quoting from page 2-9:
"The Unicode Standard allows for the dynamic composition of
accented forms. Combining characters used to create composite
forms are productive."
Given that that is the case, does that allow for what you need
for polytonic Greek? (There was some discussion about this a
few months ago on the Unicode list; you may want to review
that.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:43 EDT