[xep-support] Font Problem

[Nikolai Grigoriev]

Chris,

> we are trying to output a dash character, unicode code point x002D 
> to PDF and postscript in several different custom fonts. There is a glyph 
> for codepoint x002D in all the custom fonts. 

The problem with your fonts is due to glyph naming issues. PostScript fonts 
have no embedded Unicode information: glyphs are named, not numbered.
Following Adobe's guidelines, we use the Adobe Glyph List (AGL) to establish 
mapping from names to Unicode points.

The difference between your fonts is in the name for the dash character.
Some fonts call it 'hyphen', which is present in AGL and recognized by XEP.
Others give it a non-standard name of 'hyphenminus', not registered
in AGL; consequently, XEP has no way to determine the Unicode codepoint
for the character.

To fix the problem, you should create a custom glyph list. The custom glyph 
list is a complement to AGL that you can register for each font; this gives you
a method to establish arbitrary mappings from names to Unicode. In this
case, the glyph list can contain just a single line:

002D;hyphenminus

Save it to a file, and then add a reference to that file in a glyph-list attribute
in a font descriptor in etc/fonts.xml, for all fonts that miss the dash. You 
can read more about custom glyph lists in XEP User Guide:

http://xep.xattic.com/xep/doc/userguide.html#PS_Fonts_Unicode

(P.S.) After looking for 'hyphenminus' in newsgroups, I realized that it may 
be a rather popular defect in the fonts produced by early versions of Fontographer,
as well as older fonts from ParaType. We will consider adding this name
to the default recoding table for subsequent releases. Thank you for your feedback.

Best regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX
-------------------
(*) To unsubscribe, send a message with words 'unsubscribe xep-support'
in the body of the message to majordomo at renderx.com from the address
you are subscribed from.
(*) By using the Service, you expressly agree to these Terms of Service http://www.renderx.com/tos.html