[Fontinst] Adding unencoded glyph/Euro

[Hilmar Schlegel]

Lars Hellström wrote:

>>On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 15:39:28 +0200, Hilmar Schlegel wrote:
>>BTW, it is rather pointless to use Euro from a specific font.
WS> Why?

Function? E.g. use the Adobe Eurosans if you cannot write "Euro" for the 
purpose.

>>>Another way would be to request from Linotype a *functional* font
>>>program (correct naming of characterstrings)
>>
>>Putting a (second) Euro into the 'currency' slot is common
>>practice,
> Indeed.

Though I believe it is bad practice because of charstring naming (and 
consequently encoding) oddities which will be the consequence when doing so.
It is Apple's decision to choose a band-aid solution just for this case.

Aside from the technical aspects my suggestion would have been to use 
the currency symbol actually as the symbol for "Euro";-) They are 
equally ugly and technical fuss with currency has a considerably smaller 
impact on OS, application compatibility &c.

>>because this is the only way to make the Euro
>>accessible in certain programs.  (In particular on Mac,
>>as far as I know.)

It is a "fast" solution which requires "only" to change and amend every 
font. This is good for business but can lead to long and less productive 
discussions on font-related lists;-)

Seriously, I consider the incompatibility a relevant deficit. Moreover 
wrong charstring names cause the entire idea of Fontinst to fail. (One 
can work around but it is neither convenient nor reliable.)

> I don't think this is really the case, but it is probably far easier (from
> the foundries' point of view) than to actually do it right. 

Therefore it is done this way.
But why it isn't then restricted to the Mac-versions of the font programs?

BTW, Illustrator/Photoshop/Indesign CS files are "exchangeable between 
the MAc and MS-Win platform" - iff one restricts font usage to OT fonts 
*only* (so encoding problems are still not over;-)

Therefore we find not only a collection of "new" fonts now including the 
Euro but another "new" set being simply OT (fontname std)...

> The MacRoman
> reencoding is the simplest to request (just set a flag bit), but the FOND
> resource does support arbitrary reencoding of fonts (encoding positions to
> glyph names). 

I don't have the definitive facts for that but for practical 
applications I think the situation is similar to the pfm-files on 
MS-Win: it is not reliable across OS versions and programs.

Hilmar Schlegel

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