Re: nonstandard names for characters & reencoding

[Vladimir Volovich <vvv@vvv.vsu.ru>]

Hi,

Below is a forwarded message by Melissa O'Neill. I'd like to note that
it would be definitely a needed extension to dvips's reencoding scheme
(and maybe also to afm2tfm) to allow specifying synonyms for glyphs in
.enc files. There is a real mess with glyph names in cyrillic type1
fonts.  Moreover, different vendors use different naming schemes for
cyrillic glyphs (not Adobe's one). I would be very convenient to have
only one enc file per TeX font encoding, in which one can specify
existing synonyms for glyph names. Changing fonts is IMHO worse than a
`workaround' from the dvips's side.

	Best regards, -- Vladimir.

From: "Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>
Message-Id: <199806170914.CAA02508@daisy.cs.sfu.ca>
Subject: Re: nonstandard names for characters & reencoding
To: vvv@vvv.vsu.ru (Vladimir Volovich)
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 02:14:15 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: fontinst@cogs.susx.ac.uk

Vladimir Volovich writes:
> Some type1 fonts have nonstandard names for some characters. An
> example is /Ng vs /Eng, but there are a lot of other examples
> (including funny ones, e.g. /quilsinglleft instead of /guilsinglleft;
> /numero instead of /afii61352, etc, etc, etc).
> 
> Fontinst is able to deal with this: if e.g. it sees that there is no
> /Ng in the AFM, it can use /Eng when creating vpl file.
> 
> But it is not sufficient to use only virtual fonts (?): we also should
> use ReEncodeFont with some .enc file. But how can one specify there
> variants of glyph names? It is simply impossible to create a separate
> enc file for each font out there, because there are a LOT of them with
> various differences and variants. Maybe, an extension to dvips is
> needed to be able to specify there variants for some character names?
> 
> Or maybe, i'm overlooking something?

In Adobe Technical Note 5089, _Glyph Naming for Type 1 Font Programs_,
Adobe strongly recommends fonts use consistent glyph names. Also,
Adobe's names for typical latin fonts can be found in Appendix E of
_The PostScript Language Reference Manual: 2nd Edition_.

Generally, if a font uses non-standard glyph names, I'd recommend
complaining to the vendor or fixing it yourself. Admittedly, this
requires some knowledge and tools to do (but is very quick when you
know how).

It is possible to make font reencoding smarter and understand synonyms
for glyphs (the PostScript code necessary is pretty straightforward),
but my gut feeling is that this is the wrong way to address the
problem. Then again, only yesterday I recommended that DVIPS's
reencoding behaviour be adjusted to work around other bugs, so perhaps
it could make similar sense to make a further change to work around
errant fonts.

    Melissa.

P.S. Probably this thread would have been better suited to the tex-fonts
mailing list rather than the fontinst mailing list, since these are
general issues not restricted to fontinst.