Re: [Freetype] Unicode charmap for symbol fonts

[Garrick Meeker]

On Sunday 01 February 2004 03:34, Steve Hartwell wrote:
> On Jan 31, 2004, at 12:36 PM, Garrick Meeker wrote:
> Well, you're right that the Unicode map for Symbol.dfont has no entry
> for U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A (i.e. FT_Set_Charmap(face,
> FT_ENCODING_UNICODE); FT_Get_Char_Index('A')).  Strictly speaking,
> Symbol could map it to glyph ID 73, which looks like an 'A', but note
> that the font doesn't have glyphs for several other characters in the
> Latin alphabet range, such as U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C, U+0044
> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D, etc.).
>
> Therefore I agree with the font designer that it would be inappropriate
> to have a Unicode mapping for U+0041 just because it happens to have a
> glyph which looks like a Latin uppercase A while lacking glyphs for
> most of the other Latin characters; in essence, since the Symbol font
> does not have mappings for the complete Roman alphabet, it ought not to
> have a mapping for any of those characters.
>
> The MacRoman encoding, on the other hand, is a legacy encoding with
> more concern for being able to enter Greek capital letters with a US
> keyboard than purity of encoding, so it maps 'C' (0x43) to glyph ID 93,
> which looks like an uppercase 'X', and is in fact the glyph for the
> Greek character CHI; 'F' maps to PSI, and so on.  So in a sense it's
> MacRoman which is an "invalid" mapping, so to speak, but it's forgiven
> because it's legacy-- a kind of Respect for the Elderly :-)

That sounds reasonable.  Thank you for explaining the encodings for this font.  
I assumed they would match more in different encodings.