Post #1807960

2026-03-08 10:10 UTC

@justvanrossum @Bahman Did the distinction not come from back in the day when a lot of glyphnames were afixxxx and designers needed something better?

Replies (3)

@paulvanderlaan@typo.social 2026-03-08 10:25

@letterror @justvanrossum @Bahman Typefaces that I work on are not always my designs. I oversee and direct the process to turn them into proper font files. That is the production phase where – in my view – we use production names for glyphs.

Open ##1807961
@justvanrossum@typo.social 2026-03-08 10:35

@letterror @Bahman of course we could argue that it's pretty crazy we even need the distinction, but here we are. PostScript and PDF are mostly why we're in this situation.

Open ##1807977
@TiroTypeworks@typo.social 2026-03-08 16:14

@letterror @justvanrossum @Bahman The distinction is 100% Adobe’s invention and exists entirely to support glyph-to-character mapping in PDFs distilled from print streams. There is no other reason why the AGLFN, uniXXXX and uXXXXX names and associated _ and . conventions exist. Indeed, this is the only really compelling case for including glyph names in font binaries at all. I remember the looks of glee from Microsoft and Google folk during a variable fonts working group meeting when I pointed out that the CFF2 table spec meant that it would now be possible to make both TTF and CFF flavour fonts without glyph names (using format 3 post table).

Open ##1807978