Re: [ft-devel] problems with synthetic cmaps

[Roland Mainz]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 9:22 PM, Alexei Podtelezhnikov
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 2:06 PM, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>>>>> (1) Don't synthesize a Unicode cmap map for symbol OpenType fonts
>>>>>     (i.e., fonts having a (3,0) cmap).
>>>>>
>>>>> (2) Discard a synthesized Unicode cmap if the number of mappings
>>>>>     is much lower than the mappings in another cmap of the font.
>>>
>>> Since Wingdings and Webdings are in Unicode 7.0, any objection to
>>>
>>> (3) Improve synthetic Unicode map by adding the missing PostScript
>>>     names for the fonts in question.
>>
>> Basically, I don't object.  However, this solution doesn't scale IMHO.
>> Symbol fonts with a (3,0) can contain arbitrary glyphs that are mapped
>> to 0xF000-0xF0FF – it's not standardized in general.  In other words,
>> we can provide proper tables for `wingding', but this solution won't
>> work for other symbol fonts.
>
> Do you think there are many symbol fonts with custom PostScriot names
> to confuse FreeType? Perhaps Hin-Tak can let us know if there are
> fonts with unrecognizable PostScript names.

Yes, there are a lot, usually partially fonts which were intended to
be downloaded to a PostScript printer as PFA with a specific document
but were instead extracted and uploaded to Usenet&co.

That *mess* was common during the early days of UNIX&X11 when good
fonts costs a lot of money, so people "circumvented" that by getting
those fonts via the PostScript output of applications, renaming them,
uploading them as "free" under different names and then use X11
fonts.alias to "rename" them back.
As legacy of "the old days" these fonts now haunt us in various
Linux&BSD distributions... ;-/

----

Bye,
Roland

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