John Jenkins wrote:
>The current generation of font tools does not generally allow the
>creation of a glyph in a font without assigning it a code-point of
>some sort.
Are you sure about this? I thought this could be done in Fontographer, for example. There certainly are tools that will allow this -- e.g. there are tools that will allow the cmaps to be edited without affecting the glyph palette -- although they may not be the tools used by non-professional / occasional type designers.
To illustrate that it's *possible* (which I know you don't question -- only whether it's possible with commonly-used tools), here are some statistics with fonts on Win2000:
# of # of chars unencoded
font name glyphs in cmap glyphs note
-------------------------------------------------------
Arial 1296 1159 137 1
Arial Unicode MS 50377 38918 11459
Dotum 40194 20610 19584
Estrangelo Edessa 264 189 75
High Tower Text 385 255 130 2
Latha 193 115 78
Mangal 671 158 513
Palatino Linotype 1328 1051 277
Notes:
1. Many of the unencoded glyphs are just empty boxes -- but some are useful shapes.
2 I don't know where this one came from. It's interesting in that it contains small cap glyphs, but it doesn't have any OpenType tables that will make it possible to access those glyphs.
>The purpose for both Adobe and Apple, at least, in making their PUA
>use public is to avoid collision more than to promote interchange.
>There is near-universal agreement that the way to get MS Word to
>handle ligatures correctly is for it to beef up its OT/AAT support...
>The consistent approach of font vendors towards the problem if
>ligation is not to include the request for them in plain text, and
>definitely *not* to use distinct code points to represent them.
Absolutely correct.
- Peter
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Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
