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slots for glyphs

Justin writes:

>All those five reasons are technical.

Er yes, but there are (IMHO) *no* reasons for A. N. User to need to know
which glyph lives in which slot in which font.  The only people who need
to know which glyph is in which slot are the back room boys and girls who
produce macro files.  And they'll be interested in the technical reasons
why we put each glyph in each slot.

>We are not doing this encoding so that it is easy to make VFs.

Thus speaks the person who doesn't have to produce VFs :-)

In case you hadn't noticed, one of my considerations with this encoding
has been to make the font implementor's job as easy as possible without
sacrificing usability.  I agree totally that in any tradeoff between
making the user's life easy and making the font implementor's life easy,
the user wins, but that doesn't mean we should totally ignore the font
implementors.

Thus speaks the person who does have to produce VFs :-)

>If VFs are needed, even if they are hard
>and long to make, people will make them.

Yes, which is why there are so many VF implementations of the Cork
encoding (sarc).

>But I think that if compromises need to be
>made, they must be made on the technical side of things, and not to the
>user's disadvantage.

Agreed.

>PS: does every other user play around with virtual fonts ?

Hardly anyone does, because there are so few tools for manipulating VFs.
But that's another story...

Alan.