[luatex] Glyph names heuristics

[Jan Tosovsky]

On 2014-03-31 Hans Hagen wrote:
> On 3/29/2014 7:51 AM, Jan Tosovsky wrote:
> > On 2014-03-28 Hans Hagen wrote:
> >> On 3/28/2014 7:23 PM, Jan Tosovsky wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Btw, has anybody any idea where the following 'dotlessi' patch has
> >>> been lost?
> >>>
> >>> http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2013/076306.html
> >>>
> >>> It was working in December in ConTeXt 2013.12.20 / LuaTeX 0.77.0 on
> >>> Windows 7
> >>
> >> might be that i can cook up a version at the context end (like an
> >> overload)
> >
> >> From my POV the font handling is a very low level part and should be
> >> kept in luatex...
> 
> we're talking of heuristics for determining glyphnames when not present
> and that is a real messy thing ... in fact, better would be to keep all
> that at the lua end (easier to overload) and eventually that might
> happen (it's quite hard to fight frozen invalid properties)
> 

My only wish is to automate it and distribute out-of-the-box without any
additional tweaking and interventions from end users.

I understand that hardcoding it into LuaTeX may be risky, but if done
properly according to the logic of other font libraries/typesetting
software, it could be more efficient. As LuaTeX can be theoretically used by
various macropackages, it means all of them would have to implement the same
thing separately.

I think that current heuristics is very good and Khaled patch made it even
better, IMHO comparable to e.g. InDesign.

Regarding efficiency. Would it be possible to create the font database as
usual and those fonts with missing glyph names mark with a special flag?
They would be 'finalized' on the first request/real use. By finalizing I
mean the complete glyphs names determination.
Why to process all of them in advance even never used? It is just an idea -
without a deep analysis of the corresponding source code.

Jan