nonstandard names for characters & reencoding

[Chris Rowley]

Melissa O'Neill wrote --

> 
> 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.

But I see no possibility of avoiding synonyms for glyphs.

We have seen that empirically they arise even in the small world of W
European language Adobe font glyphs.  That world may be small and
quirky enough for a dictator to impose a canonical name for everything
but when we get into the wilds of, for example, Unicode and math
glyphs then this solution will not be feasible.

The more theoretical reason is that two glyphs that can be
distinguished using one font cannot be distinguished using another.
Thus in order to provide a practical level of independence of
glyph-names from the set-up of particular fonts it is necessary for
two glyph-names to produce the same glyph in the smaller font.

It would also remove the subjective concept of an errant font from the
language:-).


chris